THE DEVELOPMENT OF ON - LINE SENTENCE PROCESSING IN CHILDREN

描述(由申请者提供)：本项目的目标是了解儿童(和年长的第二语言学习者)如何发现单词的含义及其在句子中的语义角色。即使是像“狗”这样简单的词，也不容易通过观察(人们通常会这样)看到一只狗来理解它们的意思。毕竟，当一只狗出现在视线中时，它的毛皮、耳朵和尾巴欢快的摇摆也是如此。当成年人说“看那只狗！”时，手指指的是这些因素或属性中的哪一个？当孩子不得不学习像“想法”或“思考”这样的词的含义时，事情就变得更加困难了，因为在这些情况下，世界上没有什么明显的东西可以指出。然而，3岁和4岁的孩子理解并说出了这些明显的“抽象”词汇。我们的项目是从观察到并不是所有的单词都出现在句子中的相同位置开始的，例如，一个人可以说“我认为(或看到)你很可爱”，但不能说“我跳到你很可爱。”令人惊讶的是，年仅两三岁的孩子对这些“位置特权”很敏感，这反过来又给出了词义的线索。由于很难通过向儿童索要定义或类似的方法来获得关于儿童词义或他们学习的信息，我们使用隐含的方法，如跟踪儿童的眼神凝视方向和对问题的反应，将单词置于不同的视觉社交环境和不同的句法结构中，以了解他们不断演变的单词知识。这些问题不仅仅是学术上的兴趣。在孩子出生后的头几年里，没有任何经过测试的认知或行为属性能比词汇增长更好地预测孩子在学校和工作场所的成功。社会经济地位较高或较低的儿童的词汇得分早在两岁时就出现了差异，这些差异在整个学年期间都在扩大，影响了孩子随后的所有学习。因此，我们的工作扩展到发现实际的家庭和早期学校环境可以最大限度地支持词汇和句法学习的环境。我们过去的工作给出了这些有利的学习环境是什么的强有力的指示，而本应用程序更深入地探讨了这些因素。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this project is to understand how children (and older second-language learners) discover the meanings of words and their semantic roles in sentences. Even for simple words like "dog" it is not easy to glean what they mean from observing (as one usually will) that there is a dog in sight. For after all, when a dog is in sight so is his fur, and his ear, and the joyous wagging of his tail. To which of these factors or propertie does the pointing finger refer when an adult says "Look at that doggie!" Things get even harder when the child has to learn the meanings of words like "idea" or "think" because in these cases there's nothing so obvious to point to out there in the world. Yet children of three and four year olds understand and utter such apparently "abstract" words. Our projects take off from the observation that not all words occur in the same places in sentences, for instance one can say "I think (or see) that you're cute" but not "I jump that you're cute." Strikingly, children as young a two- and three-year olds are sensitive to these "positional privileges," which in turn give clues t word meaning. Because it is hard to get information about children's word meanings or their learning by asking them for definitions or the like, we use implicit methods such as tracking children's eye gaze direction and responsiveness to queries that place words into different visuo-social environments and into different syntactic structures to find out about their evolving word knowledge. These issues are of much more than academic interest. No tested property of child cognition or behavior is a better predictor of school and work-place success than vocabulary growth in the first few years of life. Vocabulary scores diverge for children of higher or lower socio-economic status as early as the second birthday, and these differences increase throughout the school years, influencing all the child's subsequent learning. So our work extends to discovering ways that actual home and early school environments can maximize the supportive environment for vocabulary and syntax acquisition. Our past work gives strong indications of what these favorable learning environments are, and the present application inquires more deeply into these factors.