Fulkerson Anne L, Waxman Sandra R
Strategy & Institutional Research, The University of Toledo, USA.
Cognition. 2007 Oct;105(1):218-28. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2006.09.005. Epub 2006 Oct 24.
Recent studies reveal that naming has powerful conceptual consequences within the first year of life. Naming distinct objects with the same word highlights commonalities among the objects and promotes object categorization. In the present experiment, we pursued the origin of this link by examining the influence of words and tones on object categorization in infants at 6 and 12 months. At both ages, infants hearing a novel word for a set of distinct objects successfully formed object categories; those hearing a sequence of tones for the same objects did not. These results support the view that infants are sensitive to powerful and increasingly nuanced links between linguistic and conceptual units very early in the process of lexical acquisition.
最近的研究表明，在生命的第一年里，命名具有强大的概念性影响。用同一个词来命名不同的物体，能突出这些物体之间的共性，并促进物体分类。在本实验中，我们通过研究单词和音调对6个月和12个月大婴儿物体分类的影响，来探寻这种联系的根源。在这两个年龄段，听到用一个新单词来命名一组不同物体的婴儿成功地形成了物体类别；而听到用一系列音调来表示同一物体的婴儿则没有。这些结果支持了这样一种观点，即婴儿在词汇习得过程的早期就对语言和概念单元之间强大且日益细微的联系很敏感。
