Early semantic development: Linking language development to emerging participation in social events

这个项目的主要目标是有助于早期语言发展的新兴体现，分布和定位的认知方法的理论。几十年来，语言习得领域一直被各种方法所主导，这些方法主要在儿童的个体思维中寻找语言的学习机制，并主要集中在单词学习上，即将标签映射到其所指对象。然而，在新兴的方法中，语言被视为与其他认知和社会技能紧密结合，不可避免地沉浸在行动中，有必要重新定义语言习得的一套扩展的机制。与早期的语言功能主义理论相一致，儿童在与他人的互动中学习话语的控制力，而不是简单地与外部物体相对应。（2至12个月）和照顾者，旨在：1）扩展我们的合作工作，以揭示语言沉浸其中的早期互动的背景结构; 2）展示了语言在这些互动中所假设的时间和地点; 3）展示了语言在构建互动中所起的作用，特别是在将互动引向外部世界方面所起的作用; 4）分析了语言是如何从正在进行的身体活动中逐渐渗透出来的（去语境化）。研究方法将包括：A）在现有的语言发展框架内进行理论分析，并将认知与行动联系起来（生态心理学）和B）经验方法，该方法依赖于对现有早期互动视频语料库的定性微观分析，定量统计和这些数据的新动态分析以及原始实验工作的创新整合。该项目依赖于两个主要研究中心的专业知识，基础设施和资源的整合，这证明了高度的兼容性和互补性：美国心理学院。华沙大学带来了生态心理学和定量（传统和动态）分析方面的专业知识。比勒费尔德教授专门从事早期语义学、语言发展、早期互动的定性和定量分析。

The main goal of this project is to contribute to the theory of early language development within the emerging embodied, distributed and situated approach to cognition. For decades, the field of language acquisition has been dominated by approaches, which searched for the learning mechanisms for language mainly in the individual mind of a child and focused mostly on word learning as mapping of labels to their referents. However within the emerging approach, in which language is seen as tightly integrated with other cognitive and social skills and inextricably immersed in action, there is a need to redefine language acquisition in terms of an extended set of mechanisms. Congruently with earlier, functionalist theories of language, a child thus learns the controlling power that utterances have in interactions with other people rather than simple correspondences to external objects.In this project, we propose a series of studies on early interactions between infants (2 to 12 months) and caregivers, aiming at: 1) extending our collaborative work to reveal the background structure of early interactions in which language is immersed; 2) showing the timing and place language assumes in these interactions; 3) demonstrating the difference that language makes in structuring interactions, especially in directing them towards external world; 4) analyzing how language progressively decouples from the ongoing physical activity (decontextualization). Research methods will consist in: A) theoretical analyses within existing frameworks for language development and for linking cognition to action (ecological psychology) and B) empirical methods, which rely on an innovative integration of qualitative microanalysis of existing videocorpora of early interactions, quantitative statistical and novel dynamical analyses of these data, as well as original experimental work. The project relies on integration of the expertise, infrastructure and resources of two major research centers, which evidence a high degree of compatibility and complementarity: the Faculty of Psychology, U. of Warsaw brings in expertise in ecological psychology and quantitative (traditional and dynamical) analyses and the CITEC, U. of Bielefeld specializes in early semantics, language development, qualitative and quantitative analysis of early interaction.