Acquiring Number Word Semantics: A Syntactic Bootstrapping Approach

描述(由申请者提供)：本项目介绍了儿童如何通过习得数字词(例如，“二”、“三”)来学习单词的意义。数字词对单词学习者来说是一个特殊的挑战，原因有两个。首先，作为指代集合性质的词语，它们本质上是抽象的。其次，它们在输入中的分布与其他词项重叠，如形容词(例如，‘Little’)和量词(例如，‘Some’)，如‘Two/Little/Some Child’所示。考虑到这种重叠，人们可能会想，孩子们是如何学会为这些单词赋予正确含义的。这个项目调查了儿童使用一系列语言语境的可能性，在这些语境中，数字词、形容词和量词似乎可以(也不能)对它们的含义做出推断(例如，‘Zav of the Horses’必须是关于马的数量，而‘Very Zav ars’不能)。由于数字词在语言中是普遍存在的，这项工作解决了语言习得的基本问题。这项研究的具体目标是(A)确定是否存在一组唯一识别数字词的语言语境，以及(B)儿童是否对这些语境足够敏感，以便在单词学习中使用这些语境。为了解决(A)，将进行广泛的语料库分析以确定一组精心选择的语言上下文的频率(例如，出现在分词(X Of The Y)中，出现在The或形容词之后，被副词修饰，如‘Exact’和Very1，等等)。以及数字词、形容词和量词在这些词中出现的相对频率。为了解决(B)问题，将进行一套三个使用多式联运优先看范式的单词学习实验。在每个实验中，一个新词(ZAV)将被用来描述一组对象，在这些对象中，基数与颜色或大小的对象级属性相对立。研究的目的是确定新词出现时所处的语境是否引导儿童为其赋予数字词义(如“二”)或形容词意义(如“红”、“大”)。参与者包括2.5岁的儿童、3.5-4岁的儿童和本科生。公共卫生相关性：这项工作将关于句法自举的讨论从名词和动词学习扩展到名词短语中的单词。它有可能让我们更好地理解儿童如何学习数字词的含义，为我们提供一个更完整的单词学习过程的图景，并阐明语言如何作为进入概念系统的窗口。这个项目的核心是跨学科的，对研究数字词学习的认知心理学家和对数字词如何表示以及如何与其他词汇项目区分感兴趣的语言学家都有意义。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project addresses how children learn the meaning of words, by focusing on the acquisition of number words (e.g., 'two', 'three'). Number words pose a special challenge for word learners for two reasons. First, as words that refer to properties of sets, they are inherently abstract. Second, their distribution in the input overlaps with other lexical items, such as adjectives (e.g., 'little') and quantifiers (e.g., 'some'), as illustrated in 'two/little/some children'. Given this overlap, one might wonder how children learn to assign the correct meaning to these words. This project investigates the possibility that children could use the range of linguistic contexts in which number words, adjectives, and quantifiers can (and cannot) appear to draw inferences about their meanings (e.g., 'zav of the horses' must be about a quantity of horses, while 'very zav horses' cannot be). Because number words are universal across languages, this work addresses fundamental questions for language acquisition in general. The specific goals of this research are (a) to determine whether there is a set of linguistic contexts that uniquely identifies number words, and (b) whether children are sensitive enough to these contexts to use them in word learning. To address (a), an extensive corpus analysis will be conducted to determine the frequency of a set of carefully-selected of linguistic contexts (e.g., appearance in a partitive ('X of the Y'), appearance fter 'the' or adjectives, modification by adverbs such as 'exactly' and Very1, etc.) and the relative frequency with which number words, adjectives, and quantifiers appear in them. To address (b), a set of three word learning experiments using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm will be run. In each experiment, a novel word ('zav') will be used to describe a set of objects in which cardinality is pitted against the object-level property of color or size. The aim is to determine whether the linguistic context in which the novel word appears guides children to assign it either a number word meaning (e.g., 'two') or an adjective meaning (e.g., 'red', 'big'). The participants will be 2.5-year-olds, 3.5-4-year-olds, and undergraduates. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This work extends discussions of syntactic bootstrapping from noun and verb learning to words in the noun phrase. It has the potential to offer us a better understanding of how children learn about the meaning of number words, provide us with a more complete picture of the word learning process, and shed light on how language acts as a window into the conceptual system. This project is interdisciplinary at its core, and has implications for both cognitive psychologists working on number word learning and linguists interested in how number words are represented and are distinguished from these other lexical items.