Doctoral Dissertation Research: Considering the effects of disfluent speech on children's sentence processing capabilities and language development

许多动词可以出现在不同的句子结构中。例如，一些双及物动词--既有直接宾语又有间接宾语的动词，如“give”--在宾语顺序上是灵活的，如“Jill gave the duck a cracker”和“Jill gave a cracker to the duck.”。“一个动词在一个结构中出现的频率比另一个结构更高的趋势被称为动词偏见。听者使用动词偏向来预测句子的发展。然而，一个句子的进展可能会违背动词偏见，违背听者的预测。不准确的预测需要修改，以符合句子的预期含义。8岁以下的孩子在修改预测方面有很大的困难。这种困难不仅与句子的误解有关，而且与被动句和关系从句的习得延迟有关。本论文研究学龄前儿童是否可以使用不流利的说话者的话语（如thee uhh）来预测结构，反对动词偏见，以及是否使用不流利的这种方式可以促进语言的发展。儿童的认知发展和不流利语的使用之间的关系也将被探讨。深入了解这些问题将促进我们对儿童语言发展，语言处理以及认知发展对这些过程的影响的理解。此外，该项目的结果将对发展语言延迟的情况下制定有针对性的语言干预措施产生影响。该研究项目将使用行为和计算方法来解决这些问题。行为研究将使用眼动追踪程序来测量儿童对有不流利和没有不流利的双及物句子的期望。儿童的认知发展将通过一个经过充分验证的认知灵活性任务来衡量。在整个行为研究中，双及物动词的预期性会在句内和句间被操纵。一个计算的认知架构模型，将不流利作为低概率结构的线索，然后将被用来映射儿童的发展理解的双及物动词，并将验证对数据的行为研究。这个模型将被用来进行严格的检查语言的具体和一般的认知机制之间的微妙和细粒度的相互作用。在未来的工作中，该模型可以更广泛地应用于研究儿童语言处理能力的发展，并设计有针对性的和量身定制的语言干预。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Many verbs can occur in different sentence structures. For example, some ditransitive verbs — verbs that have both a direct and an indirect object, like "give" — are flexible as to the object ordering, as in sentences like "Jill gave the duck a cracker" and "Jill gave a cracker to the duck." The tendency for a verb to occur in one structure more frequently than another is called verb bias. Listeners use verb bias to anticipate how a sentence will progress. However, how a sentence progresses may go against verb bias and violate listener's predictions. Inaccurate predictions need to be revised in order to match the intended meaning of a sentence. Children under eight have immense difficulty with revising predictions. This difficulty is linked not only to the misinterpretations of sentences but also to the delayed acquisition of passive sentences and sentences with relative clauses. This dissertation project investigates whether preschoolers can use disfluencies in a speaker's utterance (e.g. thee uhh) to anticipate structures that go against verb bias, and whether using disfluencies in this way can facilitate language development. The relationship between children’s cognitive development and the use of disfluencies will also be explored. Gaining insight into these questions will advance our understanding of children's language development, language processing, and the impact of cognitive development on these processes. Furthermore, the results of this project will have implications for developing targeted language interventions in cases of developmental language delay. The research project will use behavioral and computational methods to address these questions. Behavioral studies will measure children's expectations for ditransitive sentences with and without disfluencies by using eye-tracking procedures. Children's cognitive development will be measured through a well-validated cognitive flexibility task. Throughout the behavioral studies, the expectedness of the ditransitives will be manipulated within and across sentences. A computational cognitive architecture model incorporating disfluencies as a cue for low probability structures will then be used to map children's developing understanding of ditransitives and will be validated against data from the behavioral studies. This model will be used to conduct rigorous examination of subtle and fine-grained interactions between language specific and general cognitive mechanisms. In future work, the model can be applied more broadly to study the development of children's language processing abilities and to design targeted and tailored language interventions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.