USE OF SYNTAX IN VERB ACQUISITION

这项研究的长期目标是发现单词的意义是如何 是由幼儿学习的；也就是说，孩子是如何映射 语言对它们的意义的影响。这一目标将通过考虑以下问题来实现 儿童在学习单词时面临的两个问题：归纳和 合并问题。对于收购存在的归纳问题 名词和形容词以及动词，并反映了世界 孩子从中发现词义丰富而复杂；如此之多 因此，仅凭这一观察结果似乎不足以确定 一句话。合并问题仅存在于动词，并且源自 事实是动词意义的成分模式被结合在一起， 或者合并成实际的动词，这在不同的语言中是不同的。建议数 研究将详细检查动词的另一个信息来源 学习；即动词出现的句法结构。 广泛的调查揭示了句法和语法之间的许多规律 动词语义；这些研究将探索是否以及在多大程度上 孩子们可以使用这些规则来学习新的动词--这个过程被称为 句法自举。要解决的主要问题包括： 句法能在多大程度上帮助动词习得？事实是 中许多动词可以出现在几种不同的句法结构中 成人语言提出了另一个问题：做多个演示(a 各种结构，每种结构只出现一次，而不是一种结构 几次)对动词学习有帮助吗？最后，如何以及何时 是语法和动词语义之间的规则，这些规则为 句法自举的过程，学会了吗？其中大部分都是 将使用一种新的语言理解方法来研究问题，这种方法 使我们能够更详细地研究语言知识 小到12个月大的孩子。

The long-term goal of the research is to discover how the meanings of words are learned by young children; that is, how the child maps the sounds of language onto their meanings. This goal will be addressed by considering two problems the child faces in learning words: the induction and conflation problems. The induction problem exists for the acquisition of nouns and adjectives as well as verbs, and reflects the fact that the world from which the child discovers word meanings is rich and complex; so much so, that observation alone seems insufficient to determine the referent of a word. The conflation problem exists only for verbs, and derives from the fact that the patter of components of verb meaning that are incorporated, or conflated, into the actual verb differs across languages. The proposed studies will examine in detail another source of information for verb learning; namely, the syntactic structures in which verbs appear. Extensive investigations have revealed many regularities between syntax and verb semantics; these studies will explore whether and to what extent children can use these regularities to learn new verbs--a process termed Syntactic Bootstrapping. The primary questions to be addressed include: How deeply within the lexicon can syntax aid verb acquisition? The fact that many verbs can appear in several different syntactic structures in the adult language suggests another question: Do multiple presentations (a variety of structures each presented once as opposed to one structure presented several times) aid in verb learning? And finally, how and when are the regularities between syntax and verb semantics, which feed the process of syntactic bootstrapping, learned? The majority of these questions will be studied using a new language comprehension method, which allows us to investigate in some detail the linguistic knowledge of children as young as twelve months of age.