Description du projet
Mettre à l’épreuve l’acquisition d’une langue
Les enfants du monde entier acquièrent une langue et avec elle la capacité humaine à communiquer des pensées complexes. Douze études ciblées sur l’acquisition de la langue seront menées à l’échelle mondiale, afin de déterminer si la langue comprime radicalement les structures de la pensée en sons ou en signes. Alors que les théories actuelles admettent un parallèle entre la pensée et la langue ou des transformations préservant le sens, le projet LeibnizDream, financé par l’UE, part du principe selon lequel la pensée est mise en correspondance avec la langue en ne concrétisant que certaines parties des représentations conceptuelles. Le projet a recruté des collaborateurs pour plus de 50 langues issues de 21 familles différentes de langues, deux langues des signes et deux langues créoles pour réaliser ces études.
Objectif
Children around the globe acquire language and with it the human ability to communicate complex thoughts. This project develops a new linguistic theory to explain language and its acquisition. Our central hypothesis is that language radically compresses thought structures to sound or sign. While current theories assume a parallel between thought and language or meaning-preserving transformations, we assume that thought is mapped to language by only realizing some pieces of conceptual representations. Adult language is hyper-efficient at compressing information. For this reason, Leibniz and many others over the last 300 years have been unable to agree on the primitives of human thought. We predict that child languages are a better mirror of the human mind. Our initial evidence suggests that children are not able to compress conceptual representations as efficiently as adults. Sometimes children produce more material than adults, leading to so-called commission errors, which have never been systematically investigated. Furthermore, comprehension is easier for children when there is a one-to-one match between language and thought. To test our central hypothesis and specify how conceptual structure is compressed into language, we carry out a series of at least twelve targeted language acquisition studies on a global scale. We have recruited collaborators for more than 50 languages from 21 different language families, two sign languages and two creoles to carry out our studies. With this data, we can formulate a complete formal model of the semantic primitives, their combination into conceptual structures, the morphological compression mechanism, and the acquisition process within our model. To accomplish these goals, we rely on insights from formal semantics, generative syntax, distributed morphology, and several other linguistic frameworks. As part of our work, we also create the first open, global research collaboration to conduct language acquisition studies.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-SyG - Synergy grantInstitution d’accueil
10117 Berlin
Allemagne