Naigles Letitia R, Maltempo Ashley
University of Connecticut.
J Child Lang. 2011 Jun;38(3):662-74. doi: 10.1017/S0305000910000334. Epub 2010 Nov 10.
Two-, three- and four-year-old English learners enacted sentences that were missing a direct object (e.g. *The zebra brings.). Previous work has indicated that preschoolers faced with such ungrammatical sentences consistently alter the usual meaning of the verb to fit the syntactic frame (enacting 'zebra comes'); older children are more likely to repair the syntax to fit the meaning of the verb (enacting 'zebra brings something'; Naigles, Gleitman & Gleitman, 1993). We investigated whether young children performed more repairs if an informative context preceded the ungrammatical sentences. Test sentences were preceded by short vignettes that created a relationship between three characters. Children repaired more sentences than had been found previously; however, older preschoolers also repaired significantly more frequently than younger preschoolers. Discourse context thus seems relevant to the acquisition of verb argument structure, but is not the sole source of information.
两岁、三岁和四岁的英语学习者会说出缺少直接宾语的句子（例如*The zebra brings.）。先前的研究表明，面对这种不符合语法的句子时，学龄前儿童会持续改变动词的通常含义以适应句法结构（表现为“zebra comes”）；年龄较大的儿童更有可能修复句法以适应动词的含义（表现为“zebra brings something”；奈格尔斯、格莱特曼和格莱特曼，1993年）。我们研究了如果在不符合语法的句子之前有一个信息丰富的语境，幼儿是否会进行更多的修复。测试句子之前有简短的小插曲，这些小插曲在三个角色之间建立了一种关系。孩子们修复的句子比之前发现的更多；然而，年龄较大的学龄前儿童修复句子的频率也明显高于年龄较小的学龄前儿童。因此，语篇语境似乎与动词论元结构的习得有关，但不是唯一的信息来源。
