Max Planck Child Study Centre, University of Manchester, UK.
Cogn Sci. 2012 Sep-Oct;36(7):1268-88. doi: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2012.01249.x. Epub 2012 May 16.
This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false-positive recognition of sentences with prototypical transitive semantics, young children showed no such effect. We examined two main implications of the results. First, it adds a novel data point to a growing body of research in cognitive linguistics and construction grammar that shows abstract linguistic categories can behave in similar ways to non-linguistic categories, for example, by showing graded membership of a category. Thus, the findings lend psychological validity to the existing cross-linguistic evidence for prototypical transitive semantics. Second, we discuss a possible explanation for the fact that prototypical sentences were processed differently in adults and children, namely, that children's transitive semantic network is not as interconnected or cognitively coherent as adults'.
本文旨在探究在成人和儿童中，一个抽象的语言结构是否表现出与非语言范畴相似的原型效应。本研究通过改编 Franks 和 Bransford（1971）的原型加变形方法，发现成人容易受到具有典型及物语义的句子的虚假正性识别的影响，而儿童则没有表现出这种效应。我们检验了研究结果的两个主要影响。首先，它为认知语言学和构式语法领域日益增多的研究提供了一个新的数据点，表明抽象的语言范畴可以以类似于非语言范畴的方式表现出来，例如，通过表现出范畴的等级成员资格。因此，这些发现为现有跨语言的典型及物语义证据提供了心理学上的有效性。其次，我们讨论了一个可能的解释，即为什么在成人和儿童中，典型句子的处理方式不同，即儿童的及物语义网络没有成人的那样相互连接或认知连贯。
