Cues to Event Individuation Used by Pre-Schoolers

学龄前儿童使用的事件个性化线索

• 批准号: 6853730
• 负责人: LAURA WAGNER
• 金额: $ 4.3万
• 依托单位: WELLESLEY COLLEGE
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-01-01 至 2005-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6853730
• 关键词: behavior test; behavioral /social science research tag; clinical research; cognition; cues; experience; human subject; language development; preschool child (1-5); psycholinguistics

Description (provided by applicant): The purpose of this project is to investigate how pre-school age children parse events into units -- that is, how they individuate events. Children between the ages of 2 and 5 years old will be tested in variants of the event counting task of Wagner & Carey (2003). Participants are shown animated movies that depict the enactment of an identifiable goal (such as painting a flower) achieved through several spatio-temporally discrete process steps (such as brush-strokes). The participants' task is to count what happens in the movie and the dependent measure is whether participants count goal units or spatio-temporal units. The project examines pre-schooler's abilities to use a variety of different kinds of cues to event individuation, from the linguistic (e.g syntactic frames, mass/count syntax), the conceptual (e.g. the agency of the actors and the number of objects present), to the situational (e.g. the relative novelty or familiarity of the event involved). Event individuation is important for understanding actions in the world. Moreover, it is a critical first step for identifying the potential referent of a linguistic predicate. Understanding how children break events down into units will provide important insight into the development of a basic feature of cognition, as well as into an enduring problem in language acquisition, namely, how children learn the meanings of verbs. In addition to contributing to our general understanding of the building blocks of human cognitive development, therefore, the results from this project may also prove helpful for our understanding of the development of language disorders.

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目的目的是调查学龄前儿童如何将事件分解为单元，即他们如何将事件个体化。 2 至 5 岁的儿童将接受 Wagner & Carey (2003) 事件计数任务的变体测试。向参与者展示动画电影，这些动画电影描述了通过几个时空离散的过程步骤（例如笔触）实现的可识别目标（例如画一朵花）。参与者的任务是计算电影中发生的事情，相关度量是参与者计算目标单位还是时空单位。 该项目检查学龄前儿童使用各种不同类型线索进行事件个性化的能力，从语言（例如句法框架、质量/计数语法）到概念（例如演员的代理和存在的物体的数量） ，到情境（例如，所涉及事件的相对新颖性或熟悉性）。 事件个性化对于理解世界上的行为很重要。此外，这是识别语言谓词的潜在指称的关键的第一步。了解儿童如何将事件分解为多个单元，将为了解认知基本特征的发展以及语言习得中的一个持久问题（即儿童如何学习动词的含义）提供重要的见解。因此，除了有助于我们对人类认知发展的组成部分的一般理解之外，该项目的结果也可能有助于我们理解语言障碍的发展。