Casenhiser Devin M
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 4088 Foreign Languages Building, MC-168, 707. S. Matthews Avenue, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
J Child Lang. 2005 May;32(2):319-43. doi: 10.1017/s0305000904006749.
Research in diachronic linguistics has shown that homonyms are often dispreferred in language. This study proposes that this trend is mirrored in the difficulties that children encounter in mapping homonyms. Two experiments are presented in support of this proposition. In Experiment 1, 16 preschool children (mean age = 4;6) are shown to perform quite well on tasks requiring them to assign novel meanings to nonsense words. They perform poorly, however, on tasks requiring them to assign a different, unrelated meaning to a known word. Experiment 2 (N = 18, mean age = 4;5) shows that preschoolers' performance on this task, however, improves when a known word appears in a syntactic frame that is not appropriate for the word (as when a verb appears in a noun syntactic frame), thereby providing a strong indication that a new meaning is appropriate.
历时语言学的研究表明，同音异义词在语言中往往不受青睐。本研究提出，这种趋势反映在儿童在映射同音异义词时遇到的困难上。本文呈现了两个实验来支持这一观点。在实验1中，16名学龄前儿童（平均年龄 = 4岁6个月）在被要求为无意义单词赋予新含义的任务中表现相当出色。然而，在被要求为已知单词赋予不同的、不相关的含义的任务中，他们表现不佳。实验2（N = 18，平均年龄 = 4岁5个月）表明，当一个已知单词出现在与该单词不匹配的句法框架中时（比如一个动词出现在名词句法框架中），学龄前儿童在这项任务上的表现会有所提高，从而有力地表明一个新的含义是合适的。
