| NSF Org: |
BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 9, 2024 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 9, 2024 |
| Award Number: | 2336013 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Rachel M. Theodore
rtheodor@nsf.gov (703)292-4770 BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2024 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2027 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $220,100.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $220,100.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
10889 WILSHIRE BLVD STE 700 LOS ANGELES CA US 90024-4200 (310)794-0102 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
3125 Campbell Hall LOS ANGELES CA US 90095-1543 |
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Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Linguistics |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
As mature speakers of a language, humans can produce and understand an indefinite number of sentences. This ability comes from a powerful cognitive system - syntax - whose properties reveal the types of computations that human minds can engage in. One core property is the capacity to encode abstract grammatical dependencies that can hold at a distance. When and how this property emerges in development is an important, outstanding theoretical question. This project examines infants? representations of non-local syntactic dependencies before their second birthdays, even before they regularly produce full sentences of their own. This investigation illuminates the active syntactic development that occurs during the second year of life. In doing so, this project provides an important step for understanding the origins of the core computational capacities that syntax relies on. This project supports education by providing training opportunities in language sciences research. In addition, the project benefits society because it includes outreach about issues in language development to local families and high school students from under-represented backgrounds.
The project focuses on the acquisition of the types of non-local syntactic dependencies in wh-questions, in which a fronted wh-phrase can act as the argument of a verb at a distance (e.g., What did the chef burn). The investigators examine when infants know that an object wh-phrase and a local object of a verb cannot co-occur, because they both express the same argument relation (e.g., *What did the chef burn the pizza). Recent work finds that 18-month-olds, but not younger infants, are aware of this complementary distribution pattern, suggesting awareness of the non-local grammatical dependency between the wh-phrase and the verb. This project provides a set of behavioral experiments that identify more precisely how 18-month-olds represent these dependencies, and the development that occurs prior to this age. Through this case study, this research establishes a firm foundation for the initial steps of syntactic dependency learning in infancy. This empirical foundation provides boundary conditions on theories of when and how initial grammatical knowledge is acquired, illuminating how learning from experience interacts with children?s early capacities for representing the speech they hear.
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.
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