The contributions of the environment and social interaction to language emergence

该奖项是作为NSF的社会，行为和经济科学博士后研究奖学金（SPRF）计划的一部分提供的。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界，工业或私营部门和政府的科学事业准备有前途的早期职业博士级科学家。SPRF的奖励包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究。NSF致力于促进来自科学界各部门的科学家，包括来自代表性不足的群体的科学家参与其研究计划和活动;博士后期间被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的重要水平。每个博士后研究员必须解决推进各自学科领域的重要科学问题。在加州伯克利大学的Mahesh Srinivasan博士的赞助下，并与芝加哥大学的Terra Edwards博士合作，该博士后奖学金支持早期职业科学家调查身体和社会互动在语言出现中的作用。在过去的几十年里，我们通过对缺乏传统语言模型的儿童的惊人自然主义观察，了解了语言的起源。这种情况往往发生在聋人群体中，大多数聋人儿童没有机会接触可感知的语言系统，如手语。尽管语言环境贫乏，儿童还是发展出了系统的手势系统，称为“家庭手势”，用于交流。这些语言出现和变化的例子被归因于儿童自身学习机制的性质。但是，在语言出现的领域中，还没有系统地探讨社会和互动的维度，特别是关于儿童和父母如何共同建立参照以及父母的社会和非语言反应在家庭标志系统发展中的作用。拟议的研究解决了语言的出现在聋哑儿童谁在他们的语言输入和环境的访问不同，并比较这种情况与homesigners和聋人本地签名。虽然有一个新出现的protactile手语（一种手语，是沟通的触觉通道）在社区的聋人盲人成年人在美国，这种新的语言尚未获得儿童，只有一些聋人盲人儿童有机会学习这种语言。通过研究盲聋儿童、手语儿童和聋哑儿童的手语，我们可以提出以下理论问题：1）当听力正常、视力正常的父母和孩子对世界的感知经验之间存在巨大差距时，他们如何相互理解并建立沟通的共同点？手语、家庭手语和盲聋儿童在沟通系统的发展方面有何比较？2)当盲聋儿童接受原触觉语言输入时，他们如何根据自己的学习和感知需要改变语言？3)手语和盲聋儿童对语言和意义表现出什么样的假设？这项研究计划将涉及混合方法，包括心理语言学实验，语言启发任务，语言编码和社会互动，以及调查。这项研究还将告诉我们，父母的社会和非语言线索是否对推动沟通系统的发展至关重要，并展示儿童如何改变他们的语言输入，使其更容易处理和学习。这是一个非常难得的机会，找到一群聋盲儿童在这样一个年轻的年龄，也没有以前的工作对儿童的收购protactile语言。特别是聋哑儿童，在这个前所未有的社会距离和孤立时期受到极大的影响。这项工作将告知教师和早期干预从业人员如何最好地为聋哑儿童提供社会和语言投入。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已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。

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Mahesh Srinivasan at University of California Berkeley, and in collaboration with Dr. Terra Edwards at University of Chicago, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the roles of the body and social interaction in language emergence. Over the last few decades, we have learned about the origins of language through stunning naturalistic observations of children who lack exposure to conventional language models. Such situations often arise within the deaf population, where the majority of deaf children do not have access to a perceptible linguistic system, like a sign language. Despite these impoverished linguistic environments, children develop systematic gestural systems, known as “homesign,” to communicate. These examples of language emergence and change have been attributed to the nature of children’s own learning mechanisms. But there is also a social and interactional dimension that has not been systematically explored within the field of language emergence, particularly with respect to how children and their parents jointly establish reference and the role of parents’ social and non-linguistic responses in the development of homesign systems. The proposed research addresses the emergence of language among DeafBlind children who vary in their access to language input and environments, and compares this situation with that of homesigners and deaf native signers. Although there is a new emerging protactile sign language (a sign language that is communicate within the tactile channel) within a community of DeafBlind adults in the US, this new language has not yet been acquired by children, and only some DeafBlind children have the opportunity to learn this language. Studying DeafBlind, homesigning, and deaf native signing children will allow us to ask the following theoretical questions: 1) When there is a large gap between a hearing, sighted parent and child’s perceptual experiences of the world, how do they converge on mutual understanding and establish common ground to communicate? How do signing, homesigning, and DeafBlind children compare in the development of their communication systems? 2) When DeafBlind children receive protactile language input, how do they change the language based on their learning and perceptual needs? 3) What kinds of assumption do homesigning and DeafBlind children exhibit about language and meaning? This research program will involve mixed methods, including psycholinguistic experiments, language elicitation tasks, coding of language and social interactions, and surveys. This research will also inform us whether parents’ social and non-linguistic cues are essential for driving the development of communication systems and demonstrate how children change their language input to make it easier to process and learn. It is an incredibly rare opportunity to find a cohort of DeafBlind children at a such a young age, and there is no previous work on children’s acquisition of protactile language. DeafBlind children, in particular, are greatly impacted during this unprecedented time of social distancing and isolation. This work will inform teachers and early intervention practitioners on how to best provide social and linguistic input for DeafBlind children.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.