Meltzoff A N
Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle 98195, USA.
J Commun Disord. 1999 Jul-Aug;32(4):251-69. doi: 10.1016/s0021-9924(99)00009-x.
There has been a revolution in our understanding of infant and toddler cognition that promises to have far-reaching implications for our understanding of communicative and linguistic development. Four empirical findings that helped to prompt this change in theory are analyzed: (a) Intermodal coordination--newborns operate with multimodal information, recognizing equivalences in information across sensory-modalities; (b) Imitation--newborns imitate the lip and tongue movements they see others perform; (c) Memory--young infants form long-lasting representations of perceived events and use these memories to generate motor productions after lengthy delays in novel contexts; (d) Theory of mind--by 18 months of age toddlers have adopted a theory of mind, reading below surface behavior to the goals and intentions in people's actions. This paper examines three views currently being offered in the literature to replace the classical framework of early cognitive development: modularity-nativism, connectionism, and theory-theory. Arguments are marshaled to support the "theory-theory" view. This view emphasizes a combination of innate structure and qualitative reorganization in children's thought based on input from the people and things in their culture. It is suggested that preverbal cognition forms a substrate for language acquisition and that analyzing cognition may enhance our understanding of certain disorders of communication.
我们对婴幼儿认知的理解发生了一场革命，这有望对我们理解交流和语言发展产生深远影响。本文分析了促使这一理论变革的四项实证研究结果：（a）跨通道协调——新生儿通过多模态信息进行运作，识别跨感官模态信息中的等效性；（b）模仿——新生儿会模仿他们看到他人做出的嘴唇和舌头动作；（c）记忆——幼儿会对感知到的事件形成持久表征，并在新情境中经过长时间延迟后利用这些记忆来产生动作；（d）心理理论——到18个月大时，幼儿已经形成了心理理论，能够透过表面行为解读人们行动中的目标和意图。本文审视了目前文献中提出的三种用以取代早期认知发展经典框架的观点：模块天赋论、联结主义和理论论。文中列举论据支持“理论论”观点。该观点强调儿童思维中先天结构与基于其文化中人和事物的输入而进行的质性重组相结合。研究表明，前语言认知构成了语言习得的基础，并且分析认知可能会增进我们对某些交流障碍的理解。
