Development and adaptation of active dependency completion mechanisms

主动依赖完成机制的开发和调整

• 批准号: 1737736
• 负责人: Richard Wright
• 金额: $ 15.83万
• 依托单位: University of Washington
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-04-15 至 2018-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1737736&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Development; adaptation; active; dependency; completion

Understanding how children learn to comprehend language as efficiently as adults do is a central goal for theories of both normal and abnormal language acquisition. Developmental research has shown that, while much linguistic knowledge develops in the first few years of life, children are not necessarily adept at quickly using this knowledge during real-time language comprehension. For example, as sentences unfold, adult listeners and readers are able to continuously predict how the sentences are likely to continue, based on their knowledge of language or the distribution of sentence structures. However, children's prediction mechanisms sometimes diverge from those of adults, and they must somehow develop adult-like predictive mechanisms during the course of language acquisition. Understanding this developmental process could lead to advances in the pedagogical techniques that aim to enhance language comprehension in children. This may also improve clinical intervention methodologies for adult patients with language disorders, whose comprehension mechanisms show similar characteristics to those of children's.This project investigates the development and adaptation of filler-gap dependency processing mechanisms in children and adults. In comprehending questions like "What was Emily eating the cake with -- ?," adults incrementally complete the dependency by associating the dislocated wh-phrase "what" with the verb, but children wait to complete the dependency until after the verb and its object is encountered. The main hypothesis of this project is that language experience and distributional regularities in the input play a key role in the development and adaptation of predictive processes in filler-gap dependency completion. The motivation for this hypothesis is two-fold. First, it is well established in developmental psychology that distributional regularities can bootstrap children's cognitive and linguistic development. Second, much work in adult psycholinguistics research has argued that syntactic priming, a processing facilitation that results from repetitions of abstract syntactic structures, reflects an implicit learning mechanism that adapts the comprehension procedures in accordance with the recent language experience. Taken together, children's comprehension mechanisms may adapt to an adult-like mechanism based on a) a long-term accumulation of filler-gap dependencies that complete at the verb position, as well as b) syntactic priming of such filler-gap dependencies within an experimental session. Conversely, adults' comprehension mechanisms should also adapt to the child-like, conservative mechanism after exposure to filler-gap dependencies that are completed at a post-verbal position. To test these predictions, Dr. Omaki will conduct i) a corpus study that investigates the distributional patterns of English filler-gap dependencies in adults' conversations and child-directed speech, and ii) five eye-tracking experiments with children and adults that explore the time course of filler-gap dependency processing, as well as its interaction with priming sentences that are designed to create a bias towards the alternative dependency completion mechanism. As such, this project links questions and methodologies in two traditionally separate fields of adult psycholinguistics and language development.

了解孩子如何学会像成年人一样有效地理解语言是正常语言习得和异常语言理论的核心目标。发展研究表明，尽管在生命的最初几年中发展了许多语言知识，但在实时语言理解期间，儿童不一定善于快速使用这些知识。例如，随着句子的发展，成人听众和读者能够根据他们的语言知识或句子结构的分布来不断预测句子如何继续进行。但是，儿童的预测机制有时与成年人的预测机制有所不同，他们必须以某种方式在语言获取过程中发展出类似成人的预测机制。了解这种发展过程可能会导致旨在增强儿童语言理解的教学技术的进步。这也可能改善了具有语言障碍的成年患者的临床干预方法，其理解机制显示出与儿童的特征相似的特征。在理解诸如“艾米丽（Emily）一起吃蛋糕的东西？”之类的问题时，成年人通过将脱位的WH-SPRASE“什么”与动词相关联，从而逐渐完成依赖性，但是孩子们等待完成依赖性，直到遇到动词及其对象后。该项目的主要假设是，输入中的语言经验和分布规律性在填充间隙依赖性完成中预测过程的发展和适应中起关键作用。这一假设的动机是两个方面。首先，在发育心理学中良好确定，分布规律可以引导儿童的认知和语言发展。其次，成人心理语言学研究中的许多工作都认为，句法启动是由抽象句法结构重复产生的处理促进，反映了一种隐含的学习机制，该机制根据最近的语言体验适应了理解程序。综上所述，儿童的理解机制可能会根据a）基于a）在动词位置完成的填充间隙依赖性的长期积累，以及b）在实验性训练中的这种填充间隙依赖性的长期积累。相反，成年人的理解机制也应适应暴露于后语言位置完成的填充间隙依赖性后的孩子状，保守的机制。为了测试这些预测，Omaki博士将进行i）一项语料库研究，该研究调查了成人对话和以儿童为指导语音的英语填充间隙依赖性的分布模式，以及ii）五个探索儿童和成人的眼球追踪实验，这些实验探索了探索与填充依赖性的相互作用的相互作用的依赖性依赖性的相互作用的时间过程。因此，该项目将成人心理语言学和语言发展的两个传统单独领域的问题和方法联系起来。