Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, United States.
Cogn Psychol. 2010 May;60(3):190-217. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2009.12.002. Epub 2010 Mar 1.
Two experiments investigated the development of fluency in interpreting adjective-noun phrases in 30- and 36-month-old English-learning children. Using online processing measures, children's gaze patterns were monitored as they heard the familiar adjective-noun phrases (e.g. blue car) in visual contexts where the adjective was either informative (e.g. blue car paired with red car or red house) or uninformative (e.g. blue car paired with blue house). Thirty-six-month-olds processed adjective-noun phrases incrementally as adults do, orienting more quickly to the target picture on informative-adjective trials than on control trials. Thirty-month-olds did not make incremental use of informative adjectives, and experienced disruption on trials when the two potential referents were identical in kind. In the younger children, difficulty in integrating prenominal adjectives with the subsequent noun was associated with slower processing speed across conditions. These findings provide evidence that skill in putting color word knowledge to use in real-time language processing emerges gradually over the third year.
两项实验探究了 30 个月和 36 个月大的英语学习儿童在口译形容词-名词短语时流利度的发展。通过在线处理测量，当孩子们听到熟悉的形容词-名词短语（例如 blue car）时，他们的注视模式会被监测，这些短语出现在视觉语境中，形容词是信息性的（例如，blue car 与 red car 或 red house 配对）或非信息性的（例如，blue car 与 blue house 配对）。36 个月大的孩子像成年人一样逐步处理形容词-名词短语，在信息性形容词的试验中比在对照试验中更快地将目光转向目标图片。30 个月大的孩子没有逐步利用信息性形容词，当两个潜在的指称物在种类上相同时，他们会在试验中遇到干扰。在年龄较小的孩子中，将前置形容词与随后的名词结合起来的困难与在各种条件下较慢的处理速度有关。这些发现为在实时语言处理中运用颜色词知识的技能在第三年逐渐发展提供了证据。
