Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 East Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820, USA.
Cognition. 2010 Oct;117(1):62-8. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.06.011. Epub 2010 Jul 24.
Artifacts pose a potential learning problem for children because the mapping between their features and their functions is often not transparent. In solving this problem, children are likely to rely on a number of information sources (e.g., others' actions, affordances). We argue that children's sensitivity to nuances in the language used to describe artifacts is an important, but so far unacknowledged, piece of this puzzle. Specifically, we hypothesize that children are sensitive to whether an unfamiliar artifact's features are highlighted using generic (e.g., "Dunkels are sticky") or non-generic (e.g., "This dunkel is sticky") language. Across two studies, older-but not younger-preschoolers who heard such features introduced via generic statements inferred that they are a functional part of the artifact's design more often than children who heard the same features introduced via non-generic statements. The ability to pick up on this linguistic cue may expand considerably the amount of conceptual information about artifacts that children derive from conversations with adults.
人工制品对儿童来说是一个潜在的学习问题，因为它们的特征与其功能之间的映射通常不透明。在解决这个问题时，儿童可能依赖于许多信息来源（例如他人的行为、可及性）。我们认为，儿童对描述人工制品的语言细微差别是否敏感是解决这个问题的重要但尚未得到承认的一部分。具体来说，我们假设儿童对不熟悉的人工制品的特征是使用通用语言（例如，“ Dunkels 是粘性的”）还是非通用语言（例如，“这个 Dunkel 是粘性的”）突出显示敏感。在两项研究中，听到通过通用语句引入的此类特征的大龄但不是年幼的学龄前儿童比听到通过非通用语句引入的相同特征的儿童更频繁地推断出它们是人工制品设计的功能部分。能够注意到这种语言线索可能会极大地扩展儿童从与成人的对话中获得的有关人工制品的概念信息的数量。
