Verb learning and the early development of sentence comprehension

描述(申请人提供)：句子理解中的一项基本任务涉及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。动词决定了哪些成分可以出现在句子中，以及它们将传达哪些参与者角色。在学习一个新动词时，儿童必须在没有动词提供的一套语义指导的情况下，确定该动词所指的参与者之间的关系。句法自举理论认为，儿童使用成人句法知识的前身来理解句子，从而学习动词。这一观点得到了证据的支持，即两岁以下的儿童为不同句型的动词赋予了不同的含义。这项研究提出的问题是，在句法习得的许多复杂性被克服之前，什么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视为其语义谓词论元结构的线索。句子中的名词数量很有用，因为它提供了动词论元数量的概率指示器。第二，早期的句法自学要求儿童在抽象的心理词汇中表现语言经验，这允许将句法学习快速概括到新动词上。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，应该迅速转移到含有新动词的句子上，允许逐步对句子解释和动词学习施加更精细的约束。这个项目探索句法自举是如何开始的，以及它如何与句法习得的早期进展相互作用。我们采取了两个互补的方法：(1)以婴幼儿为对象的实验将考察句子理解和动词学习中所提出的简单结构线索的检测和使用情况。(2)使用自动语义角色标注系统的计算实验将使用大量的自然儿童导向言语样本来测试我们账户的主要主张。这种实验和计算研究的结合旨在促进关于儿童如何学习他们的母语的科学知识，并指导开发新的、强大的学习协议，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是如何学习他们母语的单词和句法的；这样的研究将有助于检测和纠正语言延迟，并有助于语言教学。

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.