Nelson Deborah G Kemler, O'Neil Kelly
Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, PA 19081-1390, USA.
Dev Sci. 2005 Nov;8(6):519-24. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2005.00443.x.
We investigated how parents respond to young children's questions about the identity of artifacts. Children's questions were predominantly ambiguous about whether they were inquiring about name or function, but when their questions were more specific, they were almost always about function. For unfamiliar objects, parents responded with functional information the majority of the time, alone or in addition to names. For atypical members of familiar categories, adults usually responded only with the category name. The results indicate that adults adjust their responses in a way that often provides the information about object kind, specifically functional information in the case of artifacts, that they believe their children are lacking. Such input may contribute to the development of children's concepts and word meanings.
我们研究了父母如何回应幼儿关于人工制品身份的问题。孩子们的问题在询问名称还是功能方面大多含糊不清，但当他们的问题更具体时，几乎总是关于功能的。对于不熟悉的物体，父母大多数时候会单独提供功能信息，或者除了名称之外还提供功能信息。对于熟悉类别中的非典型成员，成年人通常只给出类别名称。结果表明，成年人会以一种通常能提供关于物体种类信息的方式调整他们的回答，对于人工制品来说，具体就是功能信息，他们认为自己的孩子缺乏这些信息。这样的输入可能有助于儿童概念和词义的发展。
