School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, University of California Merced, 5200 North Lake Road, Merced, CA 95343, USA.
Cognition. 2012 Feb;122(2):163-80. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.010. Epub 2011 Nov 20.
Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only a fraction of the vocabulary children acquire, and arguably represent the simplest case of word learning based on observations of world scenes. Here we extended the study of cross-situational word learning to a new segment of the vocabulary, action verbs, to permit a stronger test of the role of statistical information in word learning. In two experiments, on each trial 2.5-year-olds encountered two novel intransitive (e.g., "She's pimming!"; Experiment 1) or transitive verbs (e.g., "She's pimming her toy!"; Experiment 2) while viewing two action events. The consistency with which each verb accompanied each action provided the only source of information about the intended referent of each verb. The 2.5-year-olds used cross-situational consistency in verb learning, but also showed significant limits on their ability to do so as the sentences and scenes became slightly more complex. These findings help to define the role of cross-situational observation in word learning.
最近的证据表明，儿童可以在参考歧义（例如，Smith 和 Yu，2008）下使用跨情境统计数据来学习新的对象标签。这种证据被解释为支持这样的提议，即关于词与指称物共同出现的统计信息在词汇学习中起着强大的作用。但是，对象标签仅代表儿童获得的词汇的一小部分，并且可以说代表了基于对世界场景观察的最简单的基于观察的单词学习情况。在这里，我们将跨情境单词学习的研究扩展到词汇的一个新部分，即动作动词，以对统计信息在单词学习中的作用进行更强有力的测试。在两个实验中，在每个试验中，2.5 岁的孩子在观看两个动作事件的同时遇到两个新的不及物动词（例如，“她在弹！”；实验 1）或及物动词（例如，“她在弹她的玩具！”；实验 2）。每个动词伴随每个动作的一致性是每个动词的预期指称物的唯一信息来源。2.5 岁的孩子在动词学习中使用了跨情境一致性，但随着句子和场景变得稍微复杂一些，他们在这样做的能力上也表现出了明显的局限性。这些发现有助于确定跨情境观察在词汇学习中的作用。
