CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY OF NOMINAL CATEGORY FORMATION

2岁和3岁的儿童是聪明的名词学习者。事实上，他们非常熟练，他们通常只需要听到一个被命名的对象，就可以正确地将该名称概括为该类别的其他成员。幼儿在将名词映射到类别方面的能力尤其显著，因为名词命名了许多不同类别的物体，如物质、人、动物和文物。这项研究验证了儿童通过学习单词来学习单词的假设。他们的想法是，学到的每个单词都会让孩子们变得更聪明，学单词的速度也更快。该项目测试了四个假设：1.早期学习的名词呈现了各种统计规律，这些规律可以教授不同类型的组织原则。我们将研究一个约300个名词的语料库的统计特性，这些名词是儿童学习的第一个名词的典型。2.早期名词范畴的统计规律足以产生关于种类的知识。我们将把名词语料库教给一个联想学习设备，一个连接主义网络。3.个别儿童所知道的特定名词决定了该儿童如何解释和概括一个新遇到的名词。我们将在人工词汇学习任务中测量20至36个月大的儿童所认识的个别名词及其对新奇名词的概括性。我们将用个别儿童知道的名词呈现连接主义网络，并试图模拟个别儿童在人工单词学习任务中的表现。4.学习不同语言的儿童表现出不同的发展轨迹。我们将用英语和日语两种语言测试假设1到3。过去的研究表明，说英语和日语的儿童在对新奇物体的新奇名称的理解和概括上存在差异。这项研究验证了这一观点，即这是因为儿童的新奇名词概括反映了他们已经学习的名词的统计特性。孩子们会成为他们正在学习的特定语言的聪明学习者。

Two- and 3- year old children are smart noun learners. Indeed, they are so skilled that they often need to hear only a single object named to correctly generalize that name to other members of the category. Young children's facility in mapping nouns to categories is particularly remarkable because nouns name objects in many different kinds of categories, categories of substances, people, animals, artifacts. This research tests the hypothesis that children learn how to learn words by learning words. The idea is that each word learned makes children ever smarter and ever faster word learners. The project tests four hpotheses: 1. Early learned nouns present the kinds of statistical regularities that could teach the organizational principles of different kinds. We will study the statistical properties of a corpus of about 300 nouns that are typical of the first nouns that children learn. 2. The statistical regularities characteristic of early noun categories are sufficient to create knowledge about kinds. We will teach the corpus of nouns to an associative learning device, a connectionist net. 3. The specific nouns known by an individual child determine how that child interprets and generalizes a newly encountered noun. We will measure the individual nouns known by children 20 to 36 months of age and their generalization of novel nouns in an artificial word learning task. We will present the connectionist network with the nouns that individual children know and attempt to model individual children's performances in artificial word learning tasks. 4. Children learning different languages exhibit different developmental trajectories. We will test hypotheses 1 through 3 in two languages - English and Japanese. Past research indicates that English- and Japanese-speaking children differ in their interpretation and generalization of novel names for novel objects. This research tests the idea that this is because children's novel noun generalizations reflect the statistical properties of the nouns that they have already learned. Children become smart learners of the specific language they are learning.