Department of Psychology, Furman University, 3300 Poinsett Hwy., Greenville, SC 29613, USA.
J Child Lang. 2012 Mar;39(2):443-55. doi: 10.1017/S030500091100016X. Epub 2011 Aug 18.
Considerable research has demonstrated that English-speaking children extend nouns on the basis of shape. Here we asked whether the development of this bias is influenced by the structure of a child's primary language. We tested English- and Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 1 ; 10 and 3 ; 4 in a novel noun generalization task. Results showed that English learners demonstrated a robust shape-bias, whereas Spanish learners did not. Further, English-speaking children produced more shape-based nouns outside the laboratory than Spanish-speaking children, despite similar productive vocabulary sizes. We interpret the results as evidence that attentional biases arise from the specifics of the language environment.
大量研究表明，讲英语的儿童会根据物体的形状来对名词进行扩展。在这里，我们想知道这种偏向的发展是否受到儿童母语结构的影响。我们在一项新的名词泛化任务中测试了年龄在 1 岁 10 个月至 3 岁 4 个月的英语和西班牙语儿童。结果表明，英语学习者表现出强烈的形状偏向，而西班牙语学习者则没有。此外，尽管英语学习者和西班牙语学习者的词汇量相当，但英语学习者在实验室外使用更多基于形状的名词。我们将结果解释为注意力偏向源于语言环境的具体细节的证据。
