Huang Yi Ting, Snedeker Jesse
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Harvard University.
J Child Lang. 2011 Jun;38(3):644-61. doi: 10.1017/S0305000910000206. Epub 2010 Aug 26.
Recent work in adult psycholinguistics has demonstrated that activation of semantic representations begins long before phonological processing is complete. This incremental propagation of information across multiple levels of analysis is a hallmark of adult language processing but how does this ability develop? In two experiments, we elicit measures of incremental activation of semantic representations during word recognition in children. Five-year-olds were instructed to select a target (logs) while their eye-movements were measured to a competitor (key) that was semantically related to an absent phonological associate (lock). We found that, like adults, children made increased looks to competitors relative to unrelated control items. However, unlike adults, children continued to look at the competitor even after the target word was uniquely identified and were more likely to incorrectly select this item. Altogether, these results suggest that early lexical processing involves cascading activation but less efficient resolution of competing entries.
近期成人心理语言学的研究表明，语义表征的激活早在语音处理完成之前就开始了。信息在多个分析层面上的这种渐进式传播是成人语言处理的一个标志，但这种能力是如何发展的呢？在两项实验中，我们获取了儿童在单词识别过程中语义表征渐进式激活的测量数据。我们指示五岁的儿童选择一个目标（原木），同时测量他们对一个与缺失的语音关联项（锁）语义相关的竞争项（钥匙）的眼动情况。我们发现，与成年人一样，相对于无关的控制项，儿童对竞争项的注视增加。然而，与成年人不同的是，即使目标词被唯一识别后，儿童仍继续注视竞争项，并且更有可能错误地选择这个项目。总体而言，这些结果表明早期词汇处理涉及级联激活，但在解决竞争项方面效率较低。
