Grassmann Susanne, Stracke Marén, Tomasello Michael
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, Germany.
Cognition. 2009 Sep;112(3):488-93. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.06.010. Epub 2009 Jul 17.
Many studies have established that children tend to exclude objects for which they already have a name as potential referents of novel words. In the current study we asked whether this exclusion can be triggered by social-pragmatic context alone without pre-existing words as blockers. Two-year-old children watched an adult looking at a novel object while saying a novel word with excitement. In one condition the adult had not seen the object beforehand, and so the children interpreted the adult's utterance as referring to the gazed-at object. In another condition the adult and child had previously played jointly with the gazed-at object. In this case, children less often assumed that the adult was referring to the object but rather they searched for an alternative referent--presumably because they inferred that the gazed-at object was old news in their common ground with the adult and so not worthy of excited labeling. Since this inference based on exclusion is highly similar to that underlying the Principle of Contrast/Mutual Exclusivity, we propose that this principle is not purely lexical but rather is based on children's understanding of how and why people direct one another's attention to things either with or without language.
许多研究已经证实，儿童倾向于将他们已经有名称的物体排除在新单词的潜在指代对象之外。在当前的研究中，我们探讨了这种排除是否仅由社会语用情境触发，而无需预先存在的单词作为阻碍因素。两岁的儿童观看一位成年人看着一个新物体，同时兴奋地说出一个新单词。在一种情况下，成年人之前没有见过该物体，因此儿童将成年人的话语解释为指代所注视的物体。在另一种情况下，成年人与儿童之前曾一起玩过所注视的物体。在这种情况下，儿童较少认为成年人是在指代该物体，而是会寻找其他指代对象——大概是因为他们推断在所注视的物体在他们与成年人的共同认知中是旧事物，因此不值得兴奋地标记。由于这种基于排除的推断与对比/互斥原则背后的推断高度相似，我们提出该原则并非纯粹基于词汇，而是基于儿童对人们如何以及为何使用或不使用语言来引导彼此注意事物的理解。
