Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Cognition. 2010 Mar;114(3):442-6. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.10.015. Epub 2009 Nov 28.
When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb's syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning. The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information supports toddlers' identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds were first introduced to dialogues incorporating novel verbs either in transitive or intransitive sentences, but in the absence of any relevant referent scenes (see Yuan & Fisher, 2009). Next, toddlers viewed two candidate scenes: (a) two participants performing synchronous actions, (b) two participants performing a causative action. When asked to "find mooping", toddlers who had heard transitive sentences chose the causative scene; those who had heard intransitive sentences did not. These results demonstrate that 2-year-olds infer important components of meaning from syntactic structure alone, using it to direct their subsequent search for a referent in a visual scene.
当幼儿在听到一个新动词的同时观看一个事件时，动词的句法结构已被证明有助于他们识别其含义。当前的工作更进一步，揭示了即使在没有伴随事件的情况下，句法信息也支持幼儿识别动词的含义。首先，向 2 岁的幼儿介绍了包含新动词的对话，这些动词要么在及物句中，要么在不及物句中，但没有任何相关的参照场景（见 Yuan & Fisher，2009）。接下来，幼儿观看了两个候选场景：（a）两个参与者同步进行动作，（b）两个参与者进行因果动作。当被要求“找 mooping”时，听到及物句的幼儿选择了因果场景；听到不及物句的幼儿则没有。这些结果表明，2 岁的幼儿仅从句法结构推断出意义的重要组成部分，并用它来指导他们在视觉场景中寻找参照的后续搜索。
