LANGUAGE LEARNABILITY AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

该项目有三个目标。 第一是发展、细化， 测试儿童语言习得的外显理论。 的 理论，建立在早期的工作，如果成功的帐户， 从语法学习开始， 获得复杂的语法结构;它将与 语言学理论和语言发展的重要事实 儿童;它将处理异国情调的语言以及英语;它 将学习，尽管嘈杂，复杂，误解，或非标准的输入。 计算机模拟的理论，使用“约束满足” 人工智能研究的算法，将测试其充分性 以及关于必要和充分的信息种类的声明， 语言学习是为了工作。 第二个目标是搜索计算机化 儿童语音数据库中的“可能但不会发生的错误”， 违反了相邻关系或与格移动。 这些搜索者将在 用来检验儿童在语言上受到何种限制的说法 天生的 项目的第三部分是实验调查 儿童的规则学习机制和认知能力 相互关联 孩子们将被孤立地教授新单词，看看是否 它们使用单词的语义来猜测其句法特权（例如， 动作词=动词;施事=主语）。 概念之间的相互作用 结构和语言发展将通过研究来检查， 使动构式的习得限制，儿童的 使用“主题”或空间图式来概念化非空间事件 例如状态的变化，以及他们对空间和非空间的获取， 介词 该项目的结果可以产生新的评估方法 儿童产生特定语法结构的能力，洞察力 语言学习机制， 为语言障碍者提供的课程， 新的单词和结构的儿童，和定量措施， 语言发展

This project has three aims. The first is development, refinement, and testing of an explicit theory of language acquisition in children. The theory, building on earlier work, will if successful account for the development of language from the start of syntax learning through the acquisition of complex grammatical structures; it will be consistent with linguistic theory and the important facts of language development in children; it will deal with exotic languages as well as English; and it will learn despite noisy, complex, misinterpreted, or nonstandard inputs. A computer simulation of the theory, using "constraint satisfaction" algorithms from artificial intelligence research, will test its adequacy and claims about the kinds of information necessary and sufficient for language acquisition to work. The second aim is to search computerized databases of children's speech for "possible but nonoccurring errors", such as violations of subjacency or dative movement. These searchers will be used to test claims about what sorts of linguistic constraints children are born with. The third part of the project is an experimental investigation of certain of children's rule-learning mechanisms and their cognitive correlates. Children will be taught novel words in isolation to see if they use the semantics of a word to guess its syntactic privileges (e.g. action word = verb; agent = subject). Interactions between conceptual structure and language development will be examined by studies examining the acquisition of constraints on the causative construction, children's use of a "thematic" or spatial schema to conceptualize nonspatial events such as changes of state, and their acquisition of spatial and nonspatial prepositions. Results of the project could yield new methods of assessing children's ability to produce specific grammatical constructions, insight into the language learning mechanisms that can be used in remediation programs for language-disabled individuals, specific techniques to teach new words and constructions to children, and quantitative measures of language development.