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际行为——提供信息、提出问题、提出请求等。在任何语言中，都有句子形式的特定信号来指示它通常用于什么交际行为。该项目研究了儿童如何学习识别与他们交谈的人的交际行为，同时学习与这些行为相关的表面信号。该项目特别研究了儿童如何将疑问句联系起来（“你想要一个吗？”） cookie？”）到问题。将疑问句映射到问题提出了有趣的习得挑战。首先，孩子们需要弄清楚他们语言中疑问句的形式：虽然所有语言都倾向于有专门的疑问句，但这些疑问句的句法构成疑问句的不同：在英语中，疑问句通常与陈述句在词序上有所不同（例如“你想要一块饼干吗”与“我想要一块饼干”），但在普通话中则不然。对于语言的疑问句，孩子们需要注意形式上的规律性，但是孩子们如何弄清楚哪些规律性很重要，以及他们如何将子句类型与其规范功能联系起来？其次，孩子们需要弄清楚说话者何时提出问题（而不是做出断言）。但是，如果他们还不能依赖通常用于这些行为的形式，他们怎么能做到这一点呢？先前的研究表明，尽管任务很复杂，但孩子们在三岁之前就能理解疑问句及其作为问题的常规功能。研究儿童如何解决这个复杂的映射问题，该项目研究了如何在言语中向儿童提问，使用什么形式，比较英语和普通话：父母提问的方式有多少正式规律？说话者的提问是否存在语言外的线索？哪些行为会暴露疑问（例如，谈话中的停顿或注意力集中）？该项目测试了这样的假设：儿童学习以串联和相互信息的方式识别言语行为（问题）和子句类型（疑问）：儿童学习识别通过结合他们不断增长的对问题及其相关社会线索的了解来跟踪形式规律来识别疑问句；同样，他们通过跟踪社会线索并结合他们对疑问句语法的不断增长的理解来识别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 检查说英语的亲子二人之间的对话，研究 2 研究普通话亲子二人之间的对话，其中父母的话语将被注释为语用、韵律和语言。然后，带注释的数据将用于通过计算模型来测试这种实用句法引导假设的可行性（研究 3）。该奖项是 NSF 的法定使命，并且通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的评估，被认为值得支持。影响审查标准。