CAREER: Investigating the Noun Bias in Early Language Acquisition

人类语言的多样性惊人，然而世界各地的儿童在语言学习过程中表现出惊人的相似性。识别在不同学习环境中出现的相似性是很重要的，因为这种相似性为语言的进化基础提供了证据——是什么使人类（而不是其他动物）能够学习人类语言。然而，语言和文化的多样性意味着人类婴儿必须在很大程度上使他们的语言行为适应他们的家庭环境。这个职业项目通过研究两种不相关语言的早期单词学习，来研究学习的一致性是如何在语境中灵活适应的。这些发现有助于发展儿童语言学习的详细理论，适用于教育和临床环境中来自不同文化和语言背景的儿童。该计划促进了下一代学者进行跨语言比较研究的培训，并为社会和公众提供了教育资源。在多种语言中，儿童的第一句话更有可能指的是物体而不是动作，这种跨语言的相似性被通俗地称为“名词偏见”。这个项目调查了在高度以名词为中心的语言和文化以及更加以动词为中心的语言和文化中这种偏见的来源和强度。研究结果揭示了在早期发育过程中，什么样的经历会让孩子更倾向于或更不倾向于关注名词和类名词词。一方面，语言本身的结构可以将孩子的注意力引向名词。另一方面，成年人与孩子交流的方式也可能将他们的注意力指向名词。通过使用比较跨语言的方法，包括自发对话、眼球追踪和新词学习测试，本研究确定了名词偏见的本质，并加深了对它如何适应儿童家庭环境的特定语言和文化的理解。这些发现为语言进化基础的关键部分提供了见解：儿童是如何倾向于理解和标记他们周围的世界的。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知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Human languages are staggeringly diverse, and yet children around the world display some striking similarities in the process of language learning. It is important to identify similarities that occur across diverse learning contexts because such similarities provide evidence for the evolutionary basis of language - what makes humans (but not other animals) capable of learning human languages. And yet diversity among languages and cultures implies that human infants must considerably adapt their language behaviors to their home environments. This CAREER project investigates how consistencies in learning are flexibly adapted in context by examining early word learning in two unrelated languages. The findings contribute to the development of detailed theories of child language learning that apply to children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds in educational and clinical settings. The project advances the training of the next generation of scholars to conduct comparative cross-linguistic research and creates educational resources for use by the community and the general public.Across multiple languages, children’s first words are more likely to refer to objects than actions, a cross-linguistic similarity that is colloquially called the “noun bias”. This project investigates the source and strength of this bias across a highly noun-centric language and culture and a more verb-centric language and culture. The results shed light on what experiences make children more or less likely to focus on nouns and noun-like words during early development. On the one hand, a language itself can be structured in a way that points children’s attention to nouns. On the other hand, the ways that adults communicate with children may also point their attention to nouns. By using a comparative cross-linguistic approach that includes spontaneous conversation, eye tracking, and tests of new word learning, this research pinpoints the nature of the noun bias and deepens understanding of how it is adapted for the specific language and culture of a child’s home environment. The findings yield insight into a key part of the evolutionary basis for language: how children are biased to understand and label the world around them.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.