Verb learning and the early development of sentence comprehension

描述（由申请人提供）：句子理解的一项基本任务涉及为句子成分分配语义角色，确定谁对谁做什么。动词知识在这项任务中起着核心作用。动词决定什么成分可以出现在句子中，以及它们将传达什么参与者角色。在学习一个新的动词时，孩子必须确定动词所指的参与者之间的关系，而不需要动词提供的一套语义指令。句法自举理论认为，儿童使用成人的句法知识的前体来理解句子，从而学习动词。这一观点得到了证据的支持，即2岁的儿童对不同句子结构中的动词赋予不同的含义。拟议的研究问什么句法线索是有帮助的早期收购，在许多复杂的句法收购已被征服。首先，我们认为，儿童把句子中名词的数量作为其语义谓词-论元结构的线索。句子中名词的数量是有用的，因为它提供了动词的参数数量的概率指标。第二，早期句法自举需要儿童在抽象的心理词汇中表现语言经验，这使得句法学习能够快速概括为新的动词。因此，我们认为，语言特定的语法学习，如检测英语中的词序的意义，应迅速转移到句子包含新的动词，允许逐步更好的约束句子的解释和动词学习。这个项目探讨了句法引导是如何开始的，以及它如何与句法习得的早期进展相互作用。我们采取了两种互补的方法：（1）婴儿和幼儿的实验将调查检测和使用所提出的简单结构线索的句子解释和动词学习。(2)使用自动语义角色标记系统的计算实验将使用大量的自然儿童导向语音样本来测试我们的帐户的主要主张。这种实验和计算研究的结合旨在推进关于儿童如何学习母语的科学知识，并指导开发新的，强大的学习协议，这些协议将用于自动自然语言处理。拟议的研究将帮助我们了解婴幼儿如何学习母语的单词和句法;这样的研究将有助于发现和补救语言延迟，以及语言教学。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A fundamental task in sentence comprehension involves assigning semantic roles to sentence constituents, determining who does what to whom. Verb knowledge plays a central role in this task. The verb determines what constituents can appear in the sentence, and what participant roles they will convey. In learning a new verb, a child must determine what relationship among participants the verb refers to, without the set of semantic instructions provided by the verb. The syntactic bootstrapping theory proposes that children use precursors of the adult's knowledge of syntax to understand sentences and therefore to learn verbs. This view is supported by evidence that children as young as 2 assign different meanings to verbs presented in different sentence structures. The proposed research asks what syntactic cues are helpful early in acquisition, before many of the complexities of syntax acquisition have been conquered. First, we argue that children treat the number of nouns in the sentence as a cue to its semantic predicate- argument structure. The number of nouns in the sentence is useful because it provides a probabilistic indicator of the verb's number of arguments. Second, early syntactic bootstrapping requires that children represent language experience in an abstract mental vocabulary that permits rapid generalization of syntactic learning to new verbs. Thus, we argue that language-specific grammatical learning, such as detecting the significance of word order in English, should transfer quickly to sentences containing new verbs, permitting progressively finer constraint on sentence interpretation and verb learning. This project explores how syntactic bootstrapping begins, and how it interacts with early progress in syntax acquisition. We take two complementary approaches: (1) Experiments with infants and toddlers will investigate the detection and use of the proposed simple structural cues to sentence interpretation and verb learning. (2) Computational experiments using a system for automatic semantic role labeling will test the main claims of our account using a substantial sample of natural child-directed speech. This combination of experimental and computational studies is intended to advance scientific knowledge about how children learn their native languages, and to guide the development of new, robust learning protocols that will be of use in automatic natural language processing. The proposed research will help us to understand how infants and toddlers learn the words and syntax of their native languages; such research will contribute to the detection and remediation of language delays, and to language pedagogy.