Doctoral Dissertation Research: Computational Investigation of Extralinguistic Cognition in Developmental Parsing

Without explicit instruction, children learn language at a spectacular rate: by 5-6-years old, most children are able to speak and understand language quite well. As children learn their language(s), other cognitive systems, like memory and inhibition, are developing as well. Because language development relies on these additional cognitive systems, difficulties that stem from these developing systems may influence children’s ability to learn language.

This project uses computational tools to model the real-time process of sentence understanding to provide insights into how developing memory and inhibition may influence language understanding in children. This project serves as an important step toward understanding how developing cognitive systems can impact children’s language learning, as well as how differences in these systems can influence children’s later language performance in school.

This doctoral dissertation research focuses on children’s understanding of “temporarily” ambiguous sentences as a window into the effect of systems like memory and inhibition on language learning and understanding. Like adults, children commit early to interpretations of sentences that they are hearing in real-time. Unlike adults, however, they appear to have difficulty revising those interpretations if additional, incompatible information arrives later in the sentence.

This difficulty has been proposed to arise due to constraints on memory and/or immature inhibitory control. In this project, the researchers develop two computational models of children’s sentence processing, one of memory limitations and one of inhibitory limitations, to test these proposals and probe the interaction of these cognitive systems with developing linguistic knowledge.

By developing these models, this research provides a fuller understanding of the influence of memory and inhibition on language development and comprehension in children.

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.