Cognitive Development Center, Central European University, Hattyú utca 14, 1015 Budapest, Hungary.
Psychol Sci. 2012 Jul 1;23(7):728-33. doi: 10.1177/0956797612438734. Epub 2012 Jun 12.
Early word learning in infants relies on statistical, prosodic, and social cues that support speech segmentation and the attachment of meaning to words. It is debated whether such early word knowledge represents mere associations between sound patterns and visual object features, or reflects referential understanding of words. By measuring an event-related brain potential component known as the N400, we demonstrated that 9-month-old infants can detect the mismatch between an object appearing from behind an occluder and a preceding label with which their mother introduces it. Differential N400 amplitudes have been shown to reflect semantic priming in adults, and its absence in infants has been interpreted as a sign of associative word learning. By setting up a live communicative situation for referring to objects, we demonstrated that a similar priming effect also occurs in young infants. This finding may indicate that word meaning is referential from the outset of word learning and that referential expectation drives, rather than results from, vocabulary acquisition in humans.
婴儿的早期词汇学习依赖于统计、韵律和社会线索，这些线索支持语音分割和将意义与词汇联系起来。目前还存在争议，即这种早期的词汇知识是否仅仅代表声音模式和视觉对象特征之间的关联，还是反映了对词汇的指称理解。通过测量一种称为 N400 的事件相关脑电位成分，我们证明了 9 个月大的婴儿能够检测到从遮挡物后面出现的物体与母亲在介绍它之前用的标签之间的不匹配。在成年人中，差异 N400 幅度被证明反映了语义启动，而在婴儿中没有出现，则被解释为联想词汇学习的标志。通过为指代物体建立一个实时的交际情境，我们证明了这种类似的启动效应也发生在幼儿中。这一发现可能表明，从词汇学习的一开始，单词的意思就是指称性的，并且在人类中，指称性预期是驱动词汇习得的，而不是其结果。
