The Role of Statistical Learning in Acquiring Syntactic Categories

描述（由申请人提供）：所提出的实验将调查统计学习的句法类别，如“名词”和“动词”的收购中的作用。句法范畴知识在语言习得中的作用是普遍存在的，例如，范畴知识既有助于学习语法模式，又有助于早期单词学习。虽然语言习得的许多方面依赖于句法范畴知识，但这些范畴的学习过程尚不清楚。本研究旨在验证统计学习在句法范畴习得中的作用这一假设。来自不同句法类别的词可通过统计线索来区分，诸如它们的分布特性（即，与其他词共现），以及它们的语音特性（即，他们的声音结构），第一个具体目标是评估婴儿在获得名词和动词类别时对这些线索的敏感性。如果在类别学习中使用单词的统计特性，婴儿应该能够在类别获得的早期阶段使用这些特性来识别新的类别成员。此外，婴儿确定新词语类别的能力应该反映出它们符合该类别主要统计特征的程度，对这些统计特征的训练应该有助于他们在更小的年龄使用。婴儿对新单词的分类能力将通过测试它们是否映射到物体或动作指示物来评估。第二个具体目标是测试婴儿在类别学习中整合统计和语义信息的能力。句法类别的习得包括对统计属性和语义属性的学习，这些线索在自然语言中是相关的。如果婴儿能够整合这些线索，它们之间的相关性应该有助于学习。婴儿将熟悉包含新类别的人工语言，并操纵统计和语义线索之间的相关性。如果婴儿能够整合这些线索，他们应该能够更好地检测出同一类别中单词含义的共性，并学习这些单词可能出现的语法结构，当线索相关时，而不是当它们不相关时。未来的研究将测试患有特定语言障碍和其他发育性语言障碍的儿童（例如，晚说话者），他们表现出受损的单词学习能力和对识别句法类别的分布线索的敏感性降低。测试儿童在这些任务将解决在何种程度上受损的统计学习是这些疾病的一个促成因素。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed experiments will investigate the role of statistical learning in the acquisition of syntactic categories such as "noun" and "verb". The role of syntactic category knowledge in language acquisition is pervasive; for example, category knowledge both facilitates learning grammatical patterns and facilitates early word learning. While many aspects of language acquisition rely on syntactic category knowledge, the process by which these categories are learned is unclear. The goal of the proposed research is to test the hypothesis that statistical learning plays a role in acquiring syntactic categories. Words from different syntactic categories are distinguishable by statistical cues, such as their distributional properties (i.e., cooccurrence with other words), and their phonological properties (i.e., their sound structure), the first specific aim is to assess infants' sensitivity to these cues in the acquisition of noun and verb categories. If words' statistical properties are used in category learning, infants should be able to use these properties to identify novel category members in the early stages of category acquisition. Moreover, infants' ability to determine the category of novel words should reflect the degree to which they conform to the predominant statistical characteristics of the category, and training on these statistical properties should facilitate their use at younger ages. Infants' ability to categorize novel words will be assessed by testing whether they are mapped to object or action referents. The second specific aim is to test infants' ability to integrate statistical and semantic information in category learning. Acquisition of syntactic categories encompasses learning about both statistical properties and semantic properties, and these cues are correlated in natural language. If infants can integrate these cues, correlations between them should facilitate learning. Infants will be familiarized with an artificial language containing novel categories, and the correlations between statistical and semantic cues will be manipulated. If infants can integrate these cues, they should be better able to detect commonalities in the meanings of words within a category, and to learn the grammatical structures in which these words can occur, when cues are correlated than when they are not. Future studies will test children with Specific Language Impairment and other developmental language disorders (e.g., late talkers), who exhibit impaired word learning abilities and reduced sensitivity to distributional cues identifying syntactic categories. Testing children on these tasks will address the extent to which impaired statistical learning is a contributing factor in these disorders.