Department of Psychology, New York University, USA.
Dev Psychol. 2013 Jun;49(6):1076-89. doi: 10.1037/a0026918. Epub 2012 Jan 9.
Language is rife with ambiguity. Do children and adults meet this challenge in similar ways? Recent work suggests that while adults resolve syntactic ambiguities by integrating a variety of cues, children are less sensitive to top-down evidence. We test whether this top-down insensitivity is specific to syntax or a general feature of children's linguistic ambiguity resolution by evaluating whether children rely largely or completely on lexical associations to resolve lexical ambiguities (e.g., the word swing primes the baseball meaning of bat) or additionally integrate top-down global plausibility. Using a picture choice task, we compared 4-year-olds' ability to resolve polysemes and homophones with a Bayesian algorithm reliant purely on lexical associations and found that the algorithm's power to predict children's choices was limited. A 2nd experiment confirmed that children override associations and integrate top-down plausibility. We discuss this with regard to models of psycholinguistic development.
语言中充满了歧义。儿童和成人以相似的方式应对这一挑战吗？最近的研究表明，成年人通过整合多种线索来解决句法歧义，而儿童对自上而下的证据则不那么敏感。我们通过评估儿童是否主要或完全依赖词汇联想来解决词汇歧义（例如，单词“swing”提示“bat”的棒球含义），或者是否还整合了自上而下的全局合理性，来检验这种自上而下的不敏感性是否是特定于句法还是儿童语言歧义解决的一般特征。我们使用图片选择任务，比较了 4 岁儿童使用纯粹依赖词汇联想的贝叶斯算法来解决多义词和同音异义词的能力，发现该算法预测儿童选择的能力有限。第二个实验证实，儿童会忽略联想并整合自上而下的合理性。我们将这一点与心理语言学发展模型进行了讨论。
