THE DEVELOPMENT OF ON - LINE SENTENCE PROCESSING IN CHILDREN

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目的目标是了解儿童（和年龄较大的第二语言学习者）如何发现单词的含义及其在句子中的语义角色。即使是像“狗”这样简单的词，也不容易通过观察（通常会）看到一只狗来收集它们的意思。毕竟，当一只狗出现在视线中时，他的皮毛，他的耳朵，还有他尾巴的快乐摇摆。当一个成年人说：“看那只小狗！”时，手指指的是这些因素或特性中的哪一个？“当孩子必须学习像“想法”或“思考”这样的词的含义时，事情变得更加困难，因为在这些情况下，世界上没有任何东西可以明显地指向那里。然而，三、四奥尔兹的孩子却能理解并说出这些看似“抽象”的词语。我们的项目是从观察出发的，不是所有的单词都出现在句子的同一个地方，例如，一个人可以说“我认为（或看到）你很可爱”，但不能说“我跳你很可爱。引人注目的是，两三奥尔兹的孩子对这些“位置特权”很敏感，这反过来又给了单词意义的线索。因为它是很难获得有关儿童的词义或他们的学习，要求他们的定义等信息，我们使用隐式的方法，如跟踪儿童的眼睛注视方向和响应查询，将单词放入不同的视觉社会环境和不同的句法结构，以了解他们的词汇知识的发展。这些问题远不止学术上的兴趣。在儿童认知或行为方面，没有哪一项测试能比生命最初几年的词汇量增长更好地预测学校和工作场所的成功。社会经济地位较高或较低的儿童，在二岁生日时，词汇成绩就有差异，这种差异在整个学年都在增加，影响儿童以后的所有学习。因此，我们的工作延伸到发现实际的家庭和早期学校环境可以最大限度地提高词汇和句法习得的支持环境的方法。我们过去的工作给出了这些有利的学习环境是什么的强有力的指示，本申请更深入地探讨这些因素。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this project is to understand how children (and older second-language learners) discover the meanings of words and their semantic roles in sentences. Even for simple words like "dog" it is not easy to glean what they mean from observing (as one usually will) that there is a dog in sight. For after all, when a dog is in sight so is his fur, and his ear, and the joyous wagging of his tail. To which of these factors or propertie does the pointing finger refer when an adult says "Look at that doggie!" Things get even harder when the child has to learn the meanings of words like "idea" or "think" because in these cases there's nothing so obvious to point to out there in the world. Yet children of three and four year olds understand and utter such apparently "abstract" words. Our projects take off from the observation that not all words occur in the same places in sentences, for instance one can say "I think (or see) that you're cute" but not "I jump that you're cute." Strikingly, children as young a two- and three-year olds are sensitive to these "positional privileges," which in turn give clues t word meaning. Because it is hard to get information about children's word meanings or their learning by asking them for definitions or the like, we use implicit methods such as tracking children's eye gaze direction and responsiveness to queries that place words into different visuo-social environments and into different syntactic structures to find out about their evolving word knowledge. These issues are of much more than academic interest. No tested property of child cognition or behavior is a better predictor of school and work-place success than vocabulary growth in the first few years of life. Vocabulary scores diverge for children of higher or lower socio-economic status as early as the second birthday, and these differences increase throughout the school years, influencing all the child's subsequent learning. So our work extends to discovering ways that actual home and early school environments can maximize the supportive environment for vocabulary and syntax acquisition. Our past work gives strong indications of what these favorable learning environments are, and the present application inquires more deeply into these factors.