A cross-linguistic study of nominal category formation

描述（由申请人提供）：人类类别被组织成不同的种类，例如，生物和非生物，有生命的和无生命的，物体和物质。这些差异在人们对不同种类的推理方式以及他们对类别的神经组织中表现得很明显。本研究探讨了这些区别的发展起源。这些研究验证了一个假设，即范畴的组织成不同的种类是学习的结果之间的相关性的感知属性的东西，词汇范畴结构，和语言。为了验证这一假设，该研究提出了11项研究，调查儿童学习的前300个名词所呈现的统计学意义。本文将在英语和日语两种语言中研究范畴结构中的动词与知觉线索、事件以及动词与它们共现的关系。通过比较两种语言呈现的结构，我们可以梳理出语言和感知相关性的相关贡献。我们模拟的过程，通过这些神经网络可以组织成类的种类。从这些神经网络模拟中，我们得出了预测，然后在行为研究中对学习英语和日语作为唯一语言的儿童进行了测试。这些儿童的年龄从18个月到4岁不等。这项研究有助于我们理解语言在认知发展中的作用，并在这样做有直接影响儿童健康的语言延迟，环境发育迟缓，以及其他领域的语言学习在某种程度上受到损害。此外，本研究还寻求一个细粒度的规范所涉及的学习机制，具有普遍意义的语言在早期认知发展的作用之外。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Human categories are organized into different kinds, for example, living and nonliving things, animates and inanimates, objects and substances. These differences are evident in how people reason about different kinds and in their neural organization of categories. This research investigates the developmental origins of these distinctions. The studies test the hypothesis that the organization of categories into different kinds is the learned consequence of correlations among the perceptual properties of things, lexical category structure, and language. To test this hypothesis the research proposes 11 studies investigating the statistical regularities presented by the first 300 nouns that children learn. The regularities in category structure, their relation to perceptual cues, to events, and to the verbs with they co-occur will be studied in two languages -- English and Japanese. By comparing the structures presented by two languages we can tease apart the relevant contributions of language and perceptual correlations. We model the processes through which these regularities may organize categories into kinds with neural networks. From these neural network simulations, we derive predictions that are then tested in behavioral studies with children learning English and children learning Japanese as their only language. The children range in age from 18 months to 4 years old. This research contributes to our understanding of the role of language in cognitive development and in so doing has direct implications for child health in the areas of language delay, environmental retardation, and other areas in which language learning is in some way compromised. In addition, the research seeks a fine grained specification of the learning mechanisms involved which have general significance beyond the role of language in early cognitive development.