Statistical approaches to linguistic pattern learning

描述（由申请人提供）：拟议研究的目的是全面说明影响婴儿、儿童和成人如何从语言输入的分布信息中学习母语类别的因素。一种语言的类别由一组单词组成（例如，名词、动词），在语法句子中起着功能等同的作用。分布信息指的是在一个大的句子语料库中元素的模式，包括这些元素出现的频率，它们在句子中占据的位置，以及相邻元素提供的上下文。我们长期以来对分词统计学习（学习者如何确定哪些声音序列形成单词）的研究项目已经证明了婴儿，儿童和成人对复杂分布信息的敏感性的力量，速度和鲁棒性。在这里，我们将研究计划扩展到学习语言的高级结构的一个关键方面。在我们提出的研究中，我们使用一种微型人工语言范式，使我们能够完全控制输入中的所有分布线索，这在使用真实的语言时几乎是不可能的。参与者听一段话语样本，并对它们的可接受性做出判断。至关重要的是，在学习阶段，他们并没有听到所有可能的话语，“法律的”在人工语言;一些被扣留，用于稍后的后测试。测试后的话语要么符合学习阶段的分布模式，要么违反这些模式。关键的测试是参与者是否判断新奇但法律的言论是可以接受的，从而显示出正确概括他们所接触到的输入的能力。对儿童的研究提供了额外的支持，学习的分布线索配对的话语与视频的简单事件。对成年人的研究将用于比较，并将向他们提供视觉运动领域的学习材料，以评估学习的详细时间过程和结果对听觉语言材料的特异性。综上所述，这些研究的结果，婴儿，儿童和成人将文件的关键结构变量在语言学习，使一个分布机制的类别形成的运作，并强调这些机制可能会有所不同的年龄和领域。公共卫生相关性：语言发展是人类的标志之一，但由于早期接触不同数量的语言输入的巨大差异，因此很难研究。在实验室中几个小时内获得的人工语言的使用为语言发展机制提供了一个窗口。我们将在实验室学习语言学习，以获得一个独特的视角，了解类别（名词，动词等）是如何通过听一小部分句子中的单词模式形成的。这些研究不仅将揭示语言学习的基本机制，而且还将建立可以比较语言延迟的基准。此外，了解导致正常儿童成功习得的机制有助于确定语言障碍的位点并设计治疗障碍的方法。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose of the proposed research is to provide a comprehensive account of the factors that affect how infants, children, and adults learn the categories of their native language from distributional information in linguistic input. The categories of a language consist of sets of words (e.g., noun, verb) that play a functionally equivalent role in grammatical sentences. Distributional information refers to the patterning of elements in a large corpus of sentences and includes how frequently those elements occur, what position they occupy in a sentence, and the context provided by neighboring elements. Our longstanding program of research on statistical learning in word segmentation (how learners determine which sound sequences form words) has documented the power, rapidity, and robustness of infants, children, and adults sensitivity to complex distributional information. Here we extend that program of research to a crucial aspect of learning higher-level structures of language. In our proposed studies, we use a miniature artificial language paradigm that affords us complete control over all the distributional cues in the input, something that is virtually impossible using real languages. Participants listen to a sample of utterances and make judgments about their acceptability. Crucially, during a learning phase, they do not hear all possible utterances that are "legal" in the artificial language; some are withheld for use in a later post-test. The post-test utterances either conform to the distributional patterns present in the learning phase, or they violate those patterns. The key test is whether participants judge novel-but-legal utterances to be acceptable, thereby showing the ability to generalize correctly beyond the input to which they were exposed. Studies of children provide additional support for learning the distributional cues by pairing utterances with videos of simple events. Studies of adults will be used for comparison, and will also present them with learning materials in the visual-motor domain to assess the detailed time-course of learning and the specificity of the results to auditory linguistic materials. Taken together, the results of these studies of infants, children, and adults will document the key structural variables in language learning that enable a distributional mechanism of category formation to operate and will highlight the ways these mechanisms may differ over age and domain. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Language development is one of the hallmarks of the human species, yet it is difficult to study because of the huge variation in early exposure to different amounts of linguistic input. The use of artificial languages that are acquired in the lab over a few hours provides a window on the mechanisms of language development. We will study language learning in the lab to gain a unique perspective on how the categories (noun, verb, etc) are formed from listening to the patterns of words in a small set of sentences. These studies will not only reveal a basic mechanism of language learning, but also establish benchmarks against which language delay can be compared. Moreover, understanding the mechanisms that lead to successful acquisition in normal children can help to identify loci of language disorders and design methods for remediating disorders.