With NSF support, Dr. Cynthia Fisher, Dr. Dan Roth, and Dr. Yael Gertner will conduct a three-year study of the early development of sentence comprehension. A fundamental task in sentence comprehension involves assigning semantic roles to sentence constituents, thus determining "who does what to whom". The syntactic bootstrapping theory proposes that even very young children use precursors of the adult's knowledge of syntax to accomplish this task. The project combines experimental and computational approaches to test and refine this theory. The experimental work will investigate 15- to 30-month-olds' sensitivity to proposed simple syntactic cues to sentence interpretation. The computational work involves a system for automatic semantic role labeling; computational models of semantic role labeling learn to identify sentence constituents that fill a semantic role, and to determine their roles, such as agent or goal. The two components of this project will test the proposal that simple aspects of sentence structure guide early sentence comprehension, by examining both successes and tell-tale errors in children's comprehension of sentences, by explicitly modeling learning based on the proposed shallow description of sentence structure, and by comparing the computational model's learning progress and errors to those of the children. This combination of experimental and computational studies is intended both to advance scientific knowledge about how children learn their native languages, and to guide the development of new, robust learning protocols that will be of use in automatic natural language processing.
