University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Psychol Res. 2011 Jan;75(1):35-42. doi: 10.1007/s00426-010-0285-4. Epub 2010 Jun 4.
The nature of children's early lexical processing was investigated by asking what information 36-month-olds access and use when instructed to find a known but absent referent. Children readily retrieved stored knowledge about characteristic color, i.e., when asked to find an object with a typical color (e.g., strawberry), children tended to fixate more upon an object that had the same (e.g., red plane) as opposed to a different (e.g., yellow plane) color. They did so regardless of the fact that they had plenty of time to recognize the pictures for what they are, i.e., planes and not strawberries. These data represent the first demonstration that language-mediated shifts of overt attention in young children can be driven by individual stored visual attributes of known words that mismatch on most other dimensions. The finding suggests that lexical processing and overt attention are strongly linked from an early age.
研究人员通过要求 36 个月大的儿童寻找已知但不存在的目标物，来探究儿童早期词汇处理的本质。研究发现，儿童可以轻松地获取并使用关于特征颜色的存储信息。例如，当被要求寻找具有典型颜色（如草莓）的物体时，儿童往往会更多地注视具有相同颜色（如红色飞机）的物体，而不是不同颜色（如黄色飞机）的物体。即使他们有足够的时间来识别图片的真实内容，即飞机而不是草莓，他们也是这样做的。这些数据首次表明，在年幼的儿童中，语言介导的显性注意力转移可以由已知单词的个体存储视觉属性驱动，这些属性在大多数其他维度上不匹配。这一发现表明，词汇处理和显性注意力从早期就紧密相连。
