Early Grammar Productivity: Three Languages, Comprehension

描述（由申请人提供）：本项目旨在研究儿童语言习得中的两个关键问题：(1)幼儿何时在理解方面表现出语法生产力？(2)这种生产力的出现在跨语言（即，学习某些语言的儿童是否比学习其他语言的儿童更早出现？）和给定语言内，跨语法结构（即，某些语法结构是否比其他语法结构更早出现生产力？）之间是如何变化的？这个项目通过将语言习得研究中两个通常独立的方面结合在一起来解决这些问题。首先，这将是第一个采用跨语言方法研究儿童早期语法生产力的研究之一，重点放在三种语言上，这三种语言被选择用来进行多种类型的比较。其次，这将是第一个以理解为核心的早期语法知识的跨语言研究之一，因为儿童的新兴生产力将通过多式联运优先观察范式（IPL）进行评估。儿童在动词形态和句法方面的早期语法生产力将在英语，法语和土耳其语中进行评估。这些语言最明显的区别在于，它们对词序的依赖（英语）、对动词屈折变化的依赖（例如，修饰语代词、法语）和对名义屈折变化的依赖（土耳其语）来标记基本从句中的论点结构。本研究将进行四组实验，以探讨语言特定论点结构的习得。这些问题是关于孩子们在语序（研究1）、与主题关系相关的词法（研究2）、名词格标记（研究3）和结构引导（研究4）方面表现出的生产力。将对每个实验进行跨语言的比较，并对每种语言的跨实验进行比较。这项研究在一个重要方面揭示了儿童的语言能力何时变得像成年人一样。它对理解的关注和对不同语言的比较可以揭示这种能力的年龄如何取决于任务（理解而不是说）和学习的语言。因此，这项研究可以为评估患有语言障碍的儿童提供有关语言和任务特定里程碑的信息。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project seeks to investigate two critical questions in child language acquisition: (1) WHEN do toddlers show evidence of grammatical productivity in comprehension? (2) HOW does this productivity emergence vary, both cross-linguistically (i.e., do children learning some languages demonstrate earlier emergence than children learning other languages?) and within a given language, across grammatical constructions (i.e., do some grammatical constructions yield earlier emergence of productivity than others?)? This project addresses these questions by bringing together two usually-separate strands in language acquisition research. First, this will be one of the first studies of children's early grammatical productivity to take a cross- linguistic approach, focusing on three languages which have been selected to enable multiple types of comparisons. Second, this will be one of the first cross-linguistic studies of early grammatical knowledge to have comprehension at its core, as children's emerging productivity will be assessed via the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPL). Children's early grammatical productivity in verb morphology and syntax will be assessed in English, French, and Turkish. These languages vary most obviously in their reliance on word order (English) versus verbal inflections (i.e., clitic pronouns; French) versus nominal inflections (Turkish) for marking argument structure in the basic clause. Four sets of experiments, which investigate the acquisition of language-specific argument structure will be conducted. These ask when children demonstrate productivity with word order (Study 1), verbal morphology relevant to thematic relations (Study 2), noun case markings (Study 3), and structural bootstrapping (Study 4). Comparisons will be made across languages for each experiment and across experiments for each language. This research could reveal when children's language abilities become adult-like in one important way. Its focus on comprehension and its comparison of different languages could reveal how the age of this ability depends on the task (understanding rather than speaking) and the language being learned. This research thus could provide information about language- and task-specific milestones for assessing children with language disorders.