Doctoral Dissertation Research: Finding Interrogativity

博士论文研究：寻找疑问

• 批准号: 2140764
• 负责人: Jeffrey Lidz
• 金额: $ 1.08万
• 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: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-03-01 至 2024-02-29
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2140764&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Finding; Interrogativity

Language is used to perform various kinds of communicative acts - providing information, asking questions, making requests, etc. In any language, there are specific signals in the form of a sentence that indicates what communicative act it is typically used for. But these signals vary from language to language. This project examines how children learn to identify the communicative acts of the people speaking to them while learning the surface signals associated with these acts. Specifically, this project investigates how children come to associate interrogatives ("Do you want a cookie?") to questions. Mapping interrogatives to questions present interesting acquisition challenges. First, children need to figure out the form of interrogative clauses in their language: while all languages tend to have dedicated clauses for questions, the syntactic makeup of these interrogatives differ: in English, interrogatives usually differ from declaratives in word order (e.g. "Do you want a cookie" vs. "I want a cookie"), but not in Mandarin. To figure out the form of their language’s interrogatives, children need to notice regularities in form. But how do children figure out which regularities matter, and how do they associate clause types with their canonical function? Second, children need to figure out when speakers are asking questions (vs. making assertions or requests). But how can they do so, if they can’t yet rely on the forms typically used for these acts? Previous research shows that, despite the complexity of the task, children understand interrogatives and their conventionalized function as questions before age three. To investigate how children solve this complex mapping problem, this project examines how questions are asked in speech to children, using what forms, comparing English and Mandarin: how much formal regularity is there in how parents ask questions? And are there extralinguistic cues in speakers’ behavior that can give away questionhood (e.g., pauses in conversation or focus of attention)? The project tests the hypothesis that children learn to identify speech act (question) and clause type (interrogative) in tandem and mutually informative ways: children learn to identify interrogatives by tracking formal regularities in conjunction with their growing knowledge of questionhood and its associated social cues; similarly, they identify questions by tracking social cues in conjunction with their growing understanding of interrogative syntax. The project will consist of two corpus studies and one computational model: Study 1 examines conversations between English-speaking parent-child dyads and Study 2 conversations between Mandarin parent-child dyads, where parent utterances will be annotated for pragmatic, prosodic, and syntactic features. The annotated data will then be used to test the viability of this pragmatic syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis via computational modeling (Study 3).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

语言用于执行各种交流的行为 - 提供信息，提出问题，提出请求等。在任何语言中，句子的形式都有特定的信号，这些信号表明通常使用的是什么传达的行为。但是这些信号因语言而异。该项目考试儿童如何学会确定人们与他们交谈的沟通行为，同时学习与这些行为相关的表面信号。具体来说，该项目调查了孩子们如何提出疑问（“您想要饼干吗？”）的问题。将疑问剂映射到问题上提出了有趣的获取挑战。首先，孩子需要在其语言中找出疑问句的形式：虽然所有语言往往都有专门的条款来解决问题，但这些疑问症的句法构成不同：在英语中，疑问剂通常与单词顺序不同的宣言（例如，“您想要cookie vs.我想要cookie vs.“我想要cookie”），但不在mandarin中。为了找出他们语言疑问的形式，孩子们需要注意形式的规律性。但是，孩子们如何弄清楚哪些规律性很重要，以及如何将条款类型与规范功能联系起来？其次，孩子们需要弄清楚何时提出问题（与做出断言或请求）。但是，如果他们不能依靠通常用于这些行为的形式，他们该怎么办？先前的研究表明，制定了任务的复杂性，孩子们将疑问症及其常规功能理解为三岁之前的问题。为了调查儿童如何解决这个复杂的映射问题，该项目考试如何在向儿童讲话中提出问题，使用哪种形式，比较英语和普通话：父母如何提出问题有多少正式规律性？说话者行为的语言提示是否可以发出提问（例如，对话或关注的焦点）？该项目检验了以下假设，即儿童学会以串联和相互信息的方式来识别言语行为（问题）和条款类型（疑问）：儿童学会通过跟踪正式的规律与他们对问题的知识及其相关的社会提示来跟踪正式规律来识别疑问。同样，他们通过跟踪社交线索以及对疑问语法的不断理解来确定问题。该项目将包括两项语料库研究和一个计算模型：研究1考试讲英语的父母二元组与研究2之间的对话2之间的父母亲子二聚体之间的对话，在这些对话中，父母的话语将被注释，以进行务实，韵律和句法特征。然后，注释的数据将用于测试通过计算建模的这种实用语法引导假说的可行性（研究3）。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过基金会的智力优点和更广泛的影响审查标准通过评估来评估的。