THE MENTAL LEXICON IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

儿童在学习一门语言时至少要面对两项词汇任务：学习新单词和组织这些单词以使每个单词与其他单词区别开来。在这个过程中，孩子们也在学习语音系统，很可能词汇和语音发展的进步是相互影响的。长期目标是建立临床儿童群体如何建立词汇，它如何与语音系统接口，以及治疗方案如何有效地补救这一领域的潜在缺陷。为了实现这一目标，我们的直接目标是确定具有适龄语言发展的学龄前儿童如何建立词汇，因为为了理解混乱的过程，记录正常的过程是必不可少的。为此，提出了指导培训和研究方案。培训计划侧重于PI在纵向数据分析、单主题研究设计、认知建模和临床应用研究方面的适当研究技能的发展，特别是在特定语言障碍和功能性语音障碍方面。该互补研究计划提出了两个项目：(1)探索学前儿童新单词语音形式的学习过程，并检查单词表征结构；(2)研究语音发展对单词学习和表征的影响。这些发现为语言习得中词汇学习理论以及感知和产生之间的关系提供了可能。

Children acquiring a language are faced with at least two lexical tasks: learning new words and organizing these to uniquely distinguish each word from every other. During this process, children are also learning the phonological system, and it is likely that advances in lexical and phonological development influence one another. The long-term goal is to establish how clinical populations of children build a lexicon, how this interfaces with the phonological system, and how treatment programs may efficaciously remediate potential deficits in this area. To achieve this, our immediate goal is to determine how preschool children with age- appropriate language development build a lexicon because it is essential to document the normal process in order for disordered processes to be understood. Toward this end, mentored training and research programs are proposed. The training program focuses on the PI's development of appropriate research skills in longitudinal data analysis, single-subject research design, cognitive modeling, and clinically applied research particularly in terms of specific language impairment and functional phonological disorders. The complementary research program proposes two projects to (1) explore the processes underlying learning of the phonological forms of new words and examine the structure of word representations in preschool children, and (2) investigate the influence of phonological development on word learning and representations. The findings to emerge hold potential for theories of word learning and the relationship between perception and production in language acquisition.