Verb learning and the early development of sentence comprehension

描述（由申请人提供）：句子理解的一个基本任务是为句子成分分配语义角色，确定谁对谁做了什么。动词知识在这项任务中起着核心作用。动词决定了什么成分可以出现在句子中，以及它们将传达什么样的参与者角色。在学习一个新动词的过程中，孩子必须在没有动词提供的一组语义指令的情况下，确定动词所指的参与者之间的关系。句法引导理论认为，儿童使用成人语法知识的前体来理解句子，从而学习动词。有证据表明，两岁的孩子对不同句子结构中出现的动词赋予了不同的含义，这一观点得到了支持。这项拟议的研究询问在许多语法习得的复杂性被征服之前，哪些句法线索在习得早期是有帮助的。首先，我们认为儿童将句子中名词的数量作为其语义谓词-论证结构的线索。句子中名词的数量很有用，因为它提供了动词参数数量的概率指示。第二，早期的句法引导要求儿童用抽象的心理词汇来表达语言经验，这使得句法学习能够迅速概括为新的动词。因此，我们认为，特定于语言的语法学习，如检测英语中词序的重要性，应该迅速转移到包含新动词的句子中，从而允许对句子解释和动词学习进行更精细的约束。这个项目探讨了语法引导是如何开始的，以及它是如何与语法习得的早期进展相互作用的。我们采取了两种互补的方法：(1)以婴幼儿为实验对象，研究提出的简单结构线索在句子解释和动词学习中的发现和使用。(2)使用自动语义角色标记系统的计算实验将使用大量自然儿童导向语音样本来测试我们的帐户的主要主张。这种实验和计算研究的结合旨在推进关于儿童如何学习母语的科学知识，并指导新的、健壮的学习协议的发展，这些协议将用于自动自然语言处理。这项拟议的研究将帮助我们了解婴幼儿如何学习母语的单词和句法；这些研究将有助于发现和纠正语言延迟，并有助于语言教育学。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A fundamental task in sentence comprehension involves assigning semantic roles to sentence constituents, determining who does what to whom. Verb knowledge plays a central role in this task. The verb determines what constituents can appear in the sentence, and what participant roles they will convey. In learning a new verb, a child must determine what relationship among participants the verb refers to, without the set of semantic instructions provided by the verb. The syntactic bootstrapping theory proposes that children use precursors of the adult's knowledge of syntax to understand sentences and therefore to learn verbs. This view is supported by evidence that children as young as 2 assign different meanings to verbs presented in different sentence structures. The proposed research asks what syntactic cues are helpful early in acquisition, before many of the complexities of syntax acquisition have been conquered. First, we argue that children treat the number of nouns in the sentence as a cue to its semantic predicate- argument structure. The number of nouns in the sentence is useful because it provides a probabilistic indicator of the verb's number of arguments. Second, early syntactic bootstrapping requires that children represent language experience in an abstract mental vocabulary that permits rapid generalization of syntactic learning to new verbs. Thus, we argue that language-specific grammatical learning, such as detecting the significance of word order in English, should transfer quickly to sentences containing new verbs, permitting progressively finer constraint on sentence interpretation and verb learning. This project explores how syntactic bootstrapping begins, and how it interacts with early progress in syntax acquisition. We take two complementary approaches: (1) Experiments with infants and toddlers will investigate the detection and use of the proposed simple structural cues to sentence interpretation and verb learning. (2) Computational experiments using a system for automatic semantic role labeling will test the main claims of our account using a substantial sample of natural child-directed speech. This combination of experimental and computational studies is intended to advance scientific knowledge about how children learn their native languages, and to guide the development of new, robust learning protocols that will be of use in automatic natural language processing. The proposed research will help us to understand how infants and toddlers learn the words and syntax of their native languages; such research will contribute to the detection and remediation of language delays, and to language pedagogy.