Doctoral Dissertation Research: Similarity based interference and the acquisition of adjunct control

博士论文研究：基于相似性的干扰与辅助控制的获取

• 批准号: 1551662
• 负责人: Jeffrey Lidz
• 金额: $ 1.68万
• 依托单位: University of Maryland, College Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-03-01 至 2018-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1551662&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Similarity; based

Every community around the world has a language. In each community, within a few years and with high accuracy, children learn the language of their environment. Achieving high proficiency in at least one language is critical for learning the culture of the community, connecting with peers, and accessing an education. When language is delayed, other aspects of development may also be at risk. Studying how language develops in children is therefore of great importance, both for understanding how language interacts with other systems, and for identifying and diagnosing language delays. Although children learn language quickly, they continue to make some errors well after they achieve high proficiency in their first language. These errors, because they are so rare, provide useful insights into the mechanisms of language development. Many of the general cognitive processes proposed to interact with language in adults are known to develop much later than language, raising the question: to what extent are children's linguistic errors due to extra-linguistic processes, rather than incomplete linguistic knowledge?This research uses children's understanding of adjunct control, as in "John bumped Mary after tripping on the sidewalk," as a case study to investigate this question. For this sentence, adults only access a meaning in which John tripped, while children have been reported to exhibit a much wider range of interpretations, in which John, Mary or anyone tripped. All accounts to date of adjunct control in children have cited incomplete knowledge as the source of children's interpretations; this research pursues an alternative account--that children's knowledge is complete, but the extra-linguistic processing mechanisms are more error-prone in children than in adults, masking children's knowledge in contexts with a high processing load. Based on the manipulations used with similar types of sentences in adult sentence processing, this research investigates the effects of processing load on children's interpretations of sentences with adjunct control. At stake is a more continuous account that relates children's errors for adjunct control to parallel effects in adults, and presents the opportunity for future research to investigate other sentence types, the development of processing mechanisms, and how immature processing mechanisms affect language development. This research also includes an outreach component to local families and high schools, and will provide research experience to an undergraduate research assistant.

世界各地的每个社区都有一种语言。在每个社区，孩子们在几年之内就可以高精度地学习他们环境中的语言。精通至少一种语言对于学习社区文化、与同龄人交流以及接受教育至关重要。当语言发育迟缓时，其他方面的发展也可能面临风险。因此，研究儿童语言的发展非常重要，这不仅有助于理解语言如何与其他系统相互作用，也有助于识别和诊断语言发育迟缓。尽管孩子们学习语言的速度很快，但在他们熟练掌握第一语言后，他们仍然会犯一些错误。这些错误非常罕见，为了解语言发展机制提供了有用的见解。众所周知，成人中与语言相互作用的许多一般认知过程的发展要比语言晚得多，这就提出了一个问题：儿童的语言错误在多大程度上是由于语言外过程而不是不完整的语言知识造成的？对辅助控制的理解，如“约翰在人行道上绊倒后撞到了玛丽”，作为调查这个问题的案例研究。对于这句话，成年人只能理解约翰绊倒的含义，而据报道，儿童表现出更广泛的解释，其中约翰、玛丽或任何人绊倒了。迄今为止，所有关于儿童辅助控制的叙述都引用了不完整的知识作为儿童解释的来源；这项研究追求另一种解释——儿童的知识是完整的，但儿童的语言外处理机制比成人更容易出错，从而在高处理负荷的环境中掩盖了儿童的知识。基于成人句子处理中类似类型句子的操作，本研究探讨了处理负荷对儿童对带有附加控制的句子的解释的影响。关键在于一个更连续的解释，它将儿童辅助控制的错误与成人的平行效应联系起来，并为未来研究其他句子类型、处理机制的发展以及不成熟的处理机制如何影响语言发展提供了机会。这项研究还包括向当地家庭和高中进行推广，并将为本科生研究助理提供研究经验。