Mechanisms of Early Grammatical Learning in Infants

描述(由申请者提供)：建议的研究有几个密切相关的 围绕确定机制这一更广泛目标的相关目标 婴儿和非常小的孩子开始根据他们的词汇分类 语言。确定如何对单词进行分类是学习的关键部分 基于任何语言习得理论的语言结构。这个 这项提议调查的基本假设是，年轻人的语言 学习者对他们的语言输入进行分布分析，并且 将出现在同一类型分布中的词归类在一起 环境(例如，在歌声、快乐和之前的歌声、睡眠、 知道等)。分配信息存在于儿童的每一句话中 ，并可以提供有关基本信息的丰富来源 语言的类别。 本方案通过三个多实验对这些问题进行研究。 学习。研究1对分布环境进行分析， 对于名词和动词分类是最有信息量的，并试图将 这些环境有孩子们自己的话语。研究2调查了 12-13个月大的婴儿使用分布信息对单词进行分类 两种方法：使用以下方法研究2.1分布式分类机制测试 英语句子，研究2.2进一步测试了这些参数 使用人工语言的机械装置。最后，研究3探索了14-15个月 年长的婴儿使用屈折变化的分布模式对单词进行分类。 综上所述，这些研究的结果将大大增加我们的 对婴儿的本质的理解任何幼儿的关键的、早期的、 语法表达的阶段，以及他们是如何获得这些阶段的。因此， 关于分布分析在儿童早期分类中的作用的争论 表述可以从投机领域转向经验主义领域 调查。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed studies have several closely related aims that revolve around the broader goal of determining the mechanisms by which infants and very young children start to classify the words in their language. Determining how words are classified is a crucial part of learning the structure of a language on any theory of language acquisition. The fundamental hypothesis investigated in this proposal is that young language learners perform a distributional analysis on their linguistic input, and classify words together which occur in the same kinds of distributional environments (e.g., following a, the and happy, and preceding sings, sleep, knows, etc.). Distributional information is present in every utterance a child hears, and could provide a rich source of information about the basic categories of the language. This proposal investigates these questions with three multi-experimental studies. Study 1 undertakes an analysis of the distributional environments that are most informative for noun and verb classification, and attempts to link these environments with children's own utterances. Study 2 investigates whether 12-13-month-old infants use distributional information to categorize words in two ways: Study 2.1 tests for distributional categorization mechanisms by using English sentences, and Study 2.2 further tests the parameters of these mechanisms using artificial languages. Finally, Study 3 explores 14-15 month old infants use of distributional patterns of inflections to classify words. Taken together, the results of these studies will greatly increase our understanding of the nature of infants' any young children's crucial, early, stages of grammatical representations, and how they acquired them. Thus, the debate about the role of distributional analyses in children's early category representations can shift from the domain of speculation to that of empirical investigation.