The Development and Nature of the Processes that Underlie the Representation of Center-embedded, Recursive Structures

项目总结/摘要 表示递归结构的能力，或者那些允许元素嵌入元素中的结构， 同样的类型（例如“[ { } ]”），被认为是人类句法的关键特征，并已被牵连在 发展一些人类能力，如语言和数学。但目前 不知道用什么进程来表示递归结构，或者什么时候能够表示递归结构。 结构在幼儿中发展。拟议研究的总体目标是追踪 儿童表现递归结构能力的发展轨迹，排除通货紧缩 说明以前的成功，并确定用于表示递归的机制的类型。 结构.拟议中的研究将使用非语言排序任务来测试不同语言背景的儿童 年龄（3- 6岁）和成人可以表示抽象的递归序列，并生成新的，未经训练的 这些结构的实例。受试者将被训练触摸一系列图像在一个中心嵌入， 递归顺序，然后将测试他们将其推广到未经训练的列表的能力。另夕h 拟议的研究将控制联想学习机制，以前的研究没有考虑到 for.最后，为了测试儿童和成人对复杂递归结构的表征的性质， 儿童和成人学习和生成不同类型结构的新实例的能力（中心- 嵌入式和交叉串行依赖）将进行测试。不同的建议机制表示递归 结构以及其他结构化序列（堆栈和队列）会对 应该更容易更快地生成。了解儿童和成人如何完成这些任务将有助于 揭示了用于生成递归序列的底层机制。这些发现不仅 为人类思想的一个重要组成部分的发展提供了新的见解，它将提供一个 为今后努力理解语言缺陷的潜在认知成分奠定了基础， 在特定语言障碍中看到的。由于申请人以前的研究一直集中在 根据比较认知，拟议的研究金培训计划旨在提供培训机会， 在理想的环境中学习发展心理学方法，哈佛发展心理学实验室 问题研究

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The ability to represent recursive structures, or those which allow elements to be embedded within elements of the same kind (e.g. “[ { } ]”), is thought to be a critical feature of human syntax and has been implicated in the development of a number of human capacities, such as language and mathematics. However, it is currently unknown what processes are used to represent recursive structures, or when the ability to represent recursive structures develops in young children. The overall goals of the proposed studies are to trace the developmental trajectory of the ability to represent recursive structures in children, to rule out deflationary accounts for previous successes, and to determine the type of mechanism used to represent recursive structures. The proposed studies will use a non-linguistic sequencing task to test whether children of different ages (3- to 6-years-old) and adults can represent abstract recursive sequences and generate new, untrained instances of these structures. Subjects will be trained to touch a series of images in a center-embedded, recursive order and then will be tested on their ability to generalize this to untrained lists. Additionally, the proposed studies will control for associative learning mechanisms that previous studies have failed to account for. Lastly, to test the nature of children’s and adults’ representations of complex, recursive structures, children’s and adults’ ability to learn and generate new instances of different types of structures (center- embedded & cross-serial dependent) will be tested. Different proposed mechanisms for representing recursive structures as well as other structured sequences (stacks and queues) make different predictions about which should be easier and faster to generate. Understanding how children and adults perform on these tasks will shed light on the underlying mechanisms used to generate recursive sequences. These findings will not only provide novel insight into the development of an essential component of human thought, it will provide a foundation for future efforts to understand the underlying cognitive components of language deficits such as those seen in Specific Language Impairment. As the applicant’s previous research has been focused on comparative cognition, the proposed fellowship training plan is targeted at providing a training opportunity to learn developmental psychology methods in an ideal environment, the Harvard Laboratory for Developmental Studies.