Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
Br J Dev Psychol. 2011 Sep;29(Pt 3):375-95. doi: 10.1348/026151010X490858. Epub 2011 Mar 9.
Previous work on children's intuitive knowledge about the natural world has documented their difficulty in acquiring an overarching concept of biological life that includes plants as well as humans and non-human animals. It has also suggested that the acquisition of fundamental biological concepts like alive and die may be influenced by the language used to describe them, as evidenced by differences between English- and Indonesian-speaking children's performance in tasks involving these concepts. Here, we examine one particularly important source of linguistic information available to children during this acquisition process: everyday conversations with their parents. We take a cross-linguistic approach in analysing the evidence available to English- and Indonesian-speaking children as they acquire meanings for words corresponding to the concepts alive and die. Our analysis illustrates that young children acquiring English and Indonesian are faced with distinct problems, but that parental input in both languages does little to support the acquisition of broad, inclusive biological concepts.
先前有关儿童对自然世界直觉知识的研究记录表明，他们很难获得一个包含植物、人类和非人类动物的生物生命的总体概念。这也表明，像活着和死亡这样的基本生物概念的习得可能会受到用来描述它们的语言的影响，这可以从涉及这些概念的英语和印度尼西亚语儿童的表现差异中得到证明。在这里，我们研究了在这个习得过程中儿童可以获得的一种特别重要的语言信息来源：与父母的日常对话。我们采用跨语言的方法分析了英语和印度尼西亚语儿童在获得对应于活着和死亡概念的单词的含义时的证据。我们的分析表明，正在学习英语和印度尼西亚语的幼儿面临着不同的问题，但在这两种语言中，父母的输入几乎无助于支持广泛的、包容的生物概念的习得。
