Meints K, Plunkett K, Harris P L
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, England.
Dev Psychol. 1999 Jul;35(4):1072-8. doi: 10.1037//0012-1649.35.4.1072.
Which objects and animals are children willing to accept as referents for words they know? To answer this question, the authors assessed early word comprehension using the preferential looking task. Children were shown 2 stimuli side by side (a target and a distractor) and heard the target stimulus named. The target stimulus was either a typical or an atypical exemplar of the named category. It was predicted that children first connect typical examples with the target name and broaden the extension of the name as they get older to include less typical examples. Experiment 1 shows that when targets are named, 12-month-olds display an increase in target looking for typical but not atypical targets whereas 24-month-olds display an increase for both. Experiment 2 shows that 18-month-olds display a pattern similar to that of 24-month-olds. Implications for the early development of word comprehension are discussed.
儿童愿意将哪些物体和动物当作他们已知词汇的指代对象呢？为了回答这个问题，作者们使用偏好注视任务评估早期词汇理解能力。研究人员将两个刺激物并排展示给儿童（一个目标刺激物和一个干扰刺激物），并说出目标刺激物的名称。目标刺激物要么是所命名类别的典型示例，要么是非典型示例。据预测，儿童首先会将典型示例与目标名称联系起来，并随着年龄增长扩大该名称的外延，将不太典型的示例也包括在内。实验1表明，当说出目标名称时，12个月大的婴儿对典型目标的注视时间增加，但对非典型目标没有增加，而24个月大的婴儿对两者的注视时间都增加。实验2表明，18个月大的婴儿表现出与24个月大婴儿相似的模式。本文还讨论了对早期词汇理解发展的启示。
