Doctoral Dissertation Research: Causal Representations in Children's Transitive Sentences

博士论文研究：儿童及物句的因果表征

• 批准号: 1227892
• 负责人: Edward Gibson
• 金额: $ 1.2万
• 依托单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2015-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1227892&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Causal; Representations

This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant will support the work of doctoral student Melissa Kline under the direction of Dr. Edward Gibson.The structures of sentences contain clues to their meanings. A nonsense sentence like "The dax gorped the blicket to the voom" allows for some initial guesses: 'gorping' probably means something about sending or transferring. The research carried out in this project will address the issue of how children learn the rules that match sentence meanings with sentence form. An important test for this question is a basic sentence type, the transitive sentence (e.g. "Jane broke the lamp.") Across languages, transitive sentences are reliably used to describe causal events, but some languages like English also allow for other kinds of meanings (e.g. "Jane liked the lamp.") Even so, adult speakers tend to expect new transitive verbs to refer to causal events. Do children use a similar strategy to help them learn new verbs? Depending on the learning biases children use and the input they hear from their parents, children might make very different guesses than adults about new verb meanings.To test these questions we will examine the guesses that toddlers make about the meaning of a novel word like 'daxing.' Co-PI Kline will also use conversation transcripts to compare these guesses to the transitive sentences that parents actually say to their children. Currently, we know that children have a broad preference for certain scenes to match with transitive sentences: a girl pushing a boy in a wheelbarrow is a better guess for "The girl daxed the boy" than a girl and a boy waving their arms separately. In this research Ms. Kline will use what is known about causal perception to create closely matched scene contrasts to discover the specific cues and features that children associate with transitive verbs. This project will contribute to our understanding of how children learn verbs and sentence structures and of how conceptual representations are related to language. Funding this project also contributes to the training of a graduate student.

这项博士论文研究改进补助金将支持博士生 Melissa Kline 在 Edward Gibson 博士的指导下的工作。句子的结构包含其含义的线索。 像“The dax gorped the blicket to the voom”这样的无意义句子允许我们进行一些初步猜测：“gorping”可能意味着有关发送或传输的内容。该项目进行的研究将解决儿童如何学习句子意义与句子形式匹配的规则的问题。 该问题的一个重要测试是基本句子类型，即及物句（例如“Jane Break the lamp。”）在各种语言中，及物句可靠地用于描述因果事件，但某些语言（例如英语）也允许其他类型的含义（例如“简喜欢这盏灯。”）即便如此，成人说话者倾向于期望新的及物动词来指代因果事件。 孩子们是否使用类似的策略来帮助他们学习新动词？ 根据儿童使用的学习偏见以及他们从父母那里听到的输入，儿童可能会对新的动词含义做出与成人截然不同的猜测。为了测试这些问题，我们将检查幼儿对像“这样的新单词的含义”的猜测。大兴。 联合 PI Kline 还将使用对话记录将这些猜测与父母实际对孩子说的及物句子进行比较。 目前，我们知道孩子们对某些场景有广泛的偏好，以与及物句相匹配：一个女孩推着一个独轮手推车的男孩比一个女孩和一个男孩分别挥舞手臂更适合猜测“女孩daxed the boy”。 在这项研究中，克莱恩女士将利用已知的因果感知知识来创建紧密匹配的场景对比，以发现儿童与及物动词相关的特定线索和特征。该项目将有助于我们理解儿童如何学习动词和句子结构以及概念表征如何与语言相关。资助该项目也有助于研究生的培训。