A cross-linguistic study of nominal category formation

描述(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，有生命和无生命，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上都很明显。本研究探讨了这些差异的发展根源。这些研究检验了这样一种假设，即将类别组织成不同的类别是事物的感知属性、词汇类别结构和语言之间相互关联的后天结果。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规律。我们将在英语和日语两种语言中研究范畴结构的规律性，它们与知觉线索、事件以及与它们共现的动词的关系。通过比较两种语言呈现的结构，我们可以梳理出语言和知觉关联的相关贡献。我们用神经网络对这些规律性组织成类别的过程进行建模。从这些神经网络模拟中，我们得出了预测，然后在儿童学习英语和儿童学习日语作为唯一语言的行为研究中进行了测试。这些孩子的年龄从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，并在语言延迟、环境发育迟缓和其他语言学习受到某种程度影响的领域对儿童健康产生直接影响。此外，这项研究试图对所涉及的学习机制进行细粒度的规范，这些机制具有普遍意义，超出了语言在早期认知发展中的作用。

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.