Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, USA.
Dev Sci. 2011 Jul;14(4):925-34. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01049.x. Epub 2011 Apr 14.
The ability to infer the referential intentions of speakers is a crucial part of learning a language. Previous research has uncovered various contextual and social cues that children may use to do this. Here we provide the first evidence that children also use speech disfluencies to infer speaker intention. Disfluencies (e.g. filled pauses 'uh' and 'um') occur in predictable locations, such as before infrequent or discourse-new words. We conducted an eye-tracking study to investigate whether young children can make use of this distributional information in order to predict a speaker's intended referent. Our results reveal that young children (ages 2;4 to 2;8) reliably attend to speech disfluencies early in lexical development and are able to use disfluencies in online comprehension to infer speaker intention in advance of object labeling. Our results from two groups of younger children (ages 1;8 to 2;2 and 1;4 to 1;8) suggest that this ability emerges around age 2.
推断说话者的指称意图的能力是学习语言的一个关键部分。先前的研究已经揭示了儿童可能用来做到这一点的各种语境和社会线索。在这里，我们提供了第一个证据表明，儿童也使用言语不流畅来推断说话者的意图。不流畅（例如填充停顿“呃”和“嗯”）出现在可预测的位置，例如在不常见或语篇中新词之前。我们进行了一项眼动研究，以调查幼儿是否可以利用这种分布信息来预测说话者的预期指称。我们的结果表明，幼儿（2 岁 4 个月至 2 岁 8 个月）在词汇发展早期就可靠地关注言语不流畅，并能够在在线理解中使用不流畅来预先推断说话者的意图，而无需对物体进行标记。我们对两组年龄较小的儿童（1 岁 8 个月至 2 岁 2 个月和 1 岁 4 个月至 1 岁 8 个月）的研究结果表明，这种能力在 2 岁左右出现。
