Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Child Dev. 2011 Mar-Apr;82(2):462-70. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01522.x. Epub 2011 Mar 9.
All theories of language development suggest that learning is constrained. However, theories differ on whether these constraints arise from language-specific processes or have domain-general origins such as the characteristics of human perception and information processing. The current experiments explored constraints on statistical learning of patterns, such as the phonotactic patterns of an infants' native language. Infants in these experiments were presented with a visual analog of a phonotactic learning task used by J. R. Saffran and E. D. Thiessen (2003). Saffran and Thiessen found that infants' phonotactic learning was constrained such that some patterns were learned more easily than other patterns. The current results indicate that infants' learning of visual patterns shows the same constraints as infants' learning of phonotactic patterns. This is consistent with theories suggesting that constraints arise from domain-general sources and, as such, should operate over many kinds of stimuli in addition to linguistic stimuli.
所有语言发展理论都表明，学习是受到限制的。然而，这些限制是源于语言特有的过程还是具有普遍的来源，如人类感知和信息处理的特点，不同的理论存在分歧。本实验探讨了对模式的统计学习的限制，例如婴儿母语的音韵模式。在这些实验中，婴儿被呈现了一个类似于 J.R. Saffran 和 E.D. Thiessen（2003）使用的音韵学习任务的视觉模拟。Saffran 和 Thiessen 发现，婴儿的音韵学习受到限制，使得某些模式比其他模式更容易学习。当前的结果表明，婴儿对视觉模式的学习表现出与婴儿对音韵模式的学习相同的限制。这与理论一致，这些理论表明限制来自普遍的来源，因此，应该在除语言刺激之外的多种刺激中起作用。
