Acquisition of variation in child language learners

孩子们在没有任何正式的语言指导的情况下，表现出一种非凡的能力，可以习得他们接触到的任何语言。当一个人想到学习一门语言时，他通常会想到学习新的词汇、单词和语法规则。然而，语言习得的另一个重要方面是儿童如何习得自然语言的变化，这方面的研究尤其不足。流利地掌握一门语言需要学习语言和社会环境中更复杂和微妙的依赖关系。例如，一个说英语的人会说“went shopping”还是“wen’shoppin”，可能是由许多因素决定的，其中一些因素是话语的内部因素（例如，附近的声音或表达在更大的语法语境中的句法位置），而另一些因素是外部因素（例如，社会语境和说话者身份）。在语言学习的背景下，儿童必须学习和掌握这些可变形式的使用，并在相同的语境中以相同的速度将其应用于其他说其方言的人。拟议的研究解决了儿童如何获得这种变异的悖论。在既定的语言社区中，儿童从很小的时候就掌握了相关的发音、语法和社会条件因素。另一方面，新兴语言社区的儿童将经常规范各种形式，消除变化以创造更规则或可学习的语言系统。包含本研究的实验解决了为什么当面对原始语言数据的变化时，儿童有时会学习变化及其制约因素，而其他时候则使其规范化。利用最近的发现，这个项目检验了一种假设，即语言输入的特定属性可能会导致儿童在一种情况下匹配变化，而在另一种情况下则是规则化的。特别是，(1)这种变化是否取决于语法或社会背景，(2)语言模型的流畅性，以及(3)输入是否由说话者社区提供。该项目采用了人工语言学习范式的方法，这是一种创新的方法，使研究人员能够在30分钟的时间内对儿童进行语言学习实验。实验探讨了输入的假设属性是否会导致儿童调整他们的学习行为，在某些情况下获得变化，在其他情况下使变化规范化。提议的工作可以作为一个基础，在此基础上，可以建立关于儿童获得变异的更细致入微的假设，并为研究人员提供了一种创新的实验方法，使他们能够实证地研究儿童语言习得中的其他重要问题（但仍然只是理论上的探索）。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并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，被认为值得支持。

Children exhibit a remarkable capacity to acquire whatever language (or languages) they are exposed to without any formal linguistic instruction. When one thinks of learning a language, one often thinks of learning new vocabulary words and grammatical rules. However, another important aspect of language acquisition that is particularly under-studied is how children come to acquire variation in natural language. Mastering a language to fluency requires learning more complex and subtle dependencies in the linguistic and social environment. For example, whether an English speaker produces "went shopping" versus "wen' shoppin'" may be determined by many factors, some of which are internal to the utterance (e.g., nearby sounds or the expression's syntactic position in the larger grammatical context) whereas others are external (e.g., social context and speaker identity). In the context of language learning, children must learn and master the use of these variable forms, applying them in the same contexts and at the same rates as other speakers of their dialect. The proposed research addresses a paradox in how children acquire such variation. In established language communities, children acquire such variation--mastering the relevant articulatory, grammatical and social conditioning factors from a very young age. On the other hand, children in emerging languages communities will frequently regularize variable forms, removing variation to create a more regular or learnable linguistic system.The experiments comprising this research address why, when confronted with variability in their primary linguistic data, children sometimes learn variation and its conditioning factors, and other times regularize it. Using recent findings, this project examines the hypothesis that particular properties of the language input may lead children to match variation in one case but regularize in another. In particular, (1) whether the variation is conditioned on a grammatical or social context, (2) the fluency of the language model, and (3) whether the input is provided by a community of speakers. The project employs methods from the Artificial Language Learning paradigm--an innovative method that enables researchers to conduct language learning experiments with children in a single 30-minute session. The experiments investigate whether the hypothesized properties of the input lead children to adjust their learning behavior, acquiring variation under some circumstances and regularizing variation under others. The proposed work serve as a foundation upon which further, more nuanced hypotheses about the acquisition of variation in children can be built, as well as provide an innovative experimental approach with which researchers can empirically investigate other important (but still only theoretically explored) questions in child language acquisitionThis 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.