Soja N N, Carey S, Spelke E S
Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115.
Cognition. 1991 Feb;38(2):179-211. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(91)90051-5.
Three experiments assessed the possibility, suggested by Quine (1960, 1969) among others, that the ontology underlying natural language is induced in the course of language learning, rather than constraining learning from the beginning. Specifically, we assessed whether the ontological distinction between objects and non-solid substances conditions projection of word meanings prior to the child's mastery of count/mass syntax. Experiments 1 and 2 contrasted unfamiliar objects with unfamiliar substances in a word-learning task. Two-year-old subjects' projection of the novel word to new objects respected the shape and number of the original referent. In contrast, their projection of new words for non-solid substances ignored shape and number. There were no effects of the child's knowledge of count/mass syntax, nor of the syntactic context in which the new word was presented. Experiment 3 revealed that children's natural biases in the absence of naming do not lead to the same pattern of results. We argue that these data militate against Quine's conjecture.
三项实验评估了由奎因（1960年、1969年等）等人提出的一种可能性，即自然语言所基于的本体论是在语言学习过程中形成的，而非从一开始就限制学习。具体而言，我们评估了在儿童掌握可数/不可数句法之前，物体与非固体物质之间的本体论区分是否会影响词义的投射。实验1和实验2在一个单词学习任务中，将不熟悉的物体与不熟悉的物质进行了对比。两岁的受试者将新单词投射到新物体上时，会考虑原始指称对象的形状和数量。相比之下，他们对非固体物质新单词的投射则忽略了形状和数量。儿童对可数/不可数句法的知识以及呈现新单词的句法语境均未产生影响。实验3表明，儿童在没有命名的情况下的自然偏好并不会导致相同的结果模式。我们认为这些数据对奎因的推测不利。
