Linking Early Linguistic and Conceptual Development

描述（由申请人提供）：该提案涉及早期概念发展，语言发展以及它们之间的关系的基本问题。婴儿生活在极其丰富的环境中。每一天，他们都会遇到新的物体，见证新的事件。如果每个物体或事件都被视为独特的，这种丰富性将是压倒性的。因此，一项重要的发展任务是形成概念，以捕捉他们的经验中的共性，并学习表达这些的单词。最近的研究揭示了跨发展和跨语言的概念和语言组织之间强大而隐含的联系。婴儿开始单词学习的任务时，有一个广泛的初始期望，将新单词与广泛的共性联系起来。更具体的期望，连接特定类型的单词（例如，名词、形容词、动词）到特定种类的关系（例如，基于类别、属性和运动的共性）在几个月后出现，并由母语的结构形成。目前的建议深化了在前一阶段获得的见解，使我们更接近于理解概念和语言组织之间的这些联系的起源，演变和普遍性。第一部分的研究追溯了婴儿期望在几个战略发展点上的起源和演变。该部分包括新的方法来识别婴儿区分不同种类的单词（名词，形容词，动词）的能力的机制，并将它们适当地映射到它们的相关含义。第二部分的研究进一步证明了婴儿和儿童在学习英语以外的语言（法语、汉语）时存在这种联系。通过结合发展和跨语言的方法，拟议的项目1）拓宽了现有研究的经验和理论基础，2）提供了一个窗口，通过它可以更清楚地查看概念和语言发展之间的联系的起源和演变，和3）强调儿童内在的期望和环境的塑造作用之间的重要相互作用。这些结果应该对习得理论产生影响，并可能成为研究幼儿双语和特定语言障碍的跳板。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal addresses fundamental issues of early conceptual development, language development, and the relation between them. Infants live in an enormously rich environment. Each day, they encounter new objects and witness new events. This richness would be overwhelming if each object or event was treated as unique. Therefore, an essential developmental task is to form concepts to capture commonalities among their experiences and to learn words to express these. Recent research reveals powerful and implicit links between conceptual and linguistic organization, across development and across languages. Infants begin the task of word-learning with a broad initial expectation linking novel words to a broad range of commonalities. More specific expectations, linking particular kinds of words (e.g., noun, adjective, verb) to particular kinds of relations (e.g., category-, property-, and motion-based commonalities) emerge several months later, and are shaped by the structure of the native language. The current proposal deepens the insights gained in the previous period and brings us closer to understanding the origin, evolution, and universality of these links between conceptual and linguistic organization. The studies in Section I trace the origin and evolution of infants' expectations at several strategic developmental points. The section includes new methods to identify the mechanisms underlying infants' ability to distinguish among different kinds of words (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and map them appropriately to their associated meaning. The studies in Section II sharpen the evidence for these links in infants and children acquiring languages other than English (French; Mandarin). By combining developmental and cross-linguistic approaches, the proposed project 1) broadens the empirical and theoretical foundations of existing research, 2) provides a window through which to view more clearly the origins and evolution of links between conceptual and linguistic development, and 3) underscores the vital interaction between the expectations inherent in the child and the shaping role of the environment. The results should have implications for theories of acquisition and may serve as a springboard for research on bilingualism and specific language impairments in young children.