Basic mechanisms of language's effect on attention and learning

描述（由申请人提供）：我们在任何时候注意到什么决定了我们在那一刻学到什么，这也取决于我们过去的学习。这项研究旨在研究单词，感知线索和类别组织如何形成一个关联系统，该系统根据上下文提示注意力，使其与上下文精确协调，从而限制和推动未来的学习。虽然旧的观点认为联想学习是对个体配对的简单计数，但更先进的理论认为，人们学习的是重叠联想系统，这些系统（1）导致对注意力的系统性影响，（2）根据上下文调整学习，（3）产生高阶（几乎是规则般的）相关性。这个补助金寻求在单词学习背景下对这些过程的机械理解。24至48个月大的儿童将参与包含人工语言学习、训练任务以及儿童学习两种不同语言（英语和日语）的比较的实验，具有不同的相关系统。理解语境引导注意力的基本过程，以及语言如何以及为什么可能是一个特别有效的注意力线索，是理解语言延迟对认知发展的级联后果的第一步，也是在语言不容易为学习者所用的情况下发明调整注意力的新方法的第一步。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): What we attend to at any moment determines what we learn at that moment, and this also depends on our past learning. This grant investigates how words, perceptual cues, and category organizations form a system of associations that contextually cue attention, making it exquisitely tuned to context and thus constraining and propelling future learning. Although old views characterized associative learning as simple counting of individual pairings, more advanced theories suggest that people learn systems of overlapping associations that (1) lead to systematic effects on attention, (2) tune learning to the context, and (3) give rise to higher-order (almost rule-like) correlations. This grant seeks a mechanistic understanding of these processes in word learning context. Twenty- four to 48-months-old children will participate in the experiments containing artificial language learning, training tasks, and the comparison of children learning two different languages (English and Japanese), with different systems of correlations. Understanding the basic processes through which context guides attention and how and why language might be a particularly potent cue to attention is a first step toward understanding the cascading consequences of language delay on cognitive development and the invention of new methods for tuning attention when language is not easily available to the learner.