CLPS Department, Box 1821, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
Dev Psychol. 2013 Mar;49(3):523-32. doi: 10.1037/a0029658. Epub 2012 Aug 13.
Many studies suggest that preschoolers rely on individuals' histories of generating accurate lexical information when learning novel lexical information from them. The present study examined whether children used a speaker's accuracy about one kind of linguistic knowledge to make inferences about another kind of linguistic knowledge, focusing specifically on syntax and the lexicon. In Experiment 1, we presented children with 2 live speakers who were lexically accurate, but differed in their appropriate use of subject-verb agreement. Older 4-year-olds, but not younger 4-year-olds, relied on the accurate speaker to learn new labels for novel objects. We suggest only the older 4-year-olds might have registered that the inaccurate speaker was an unreliable source of novel linguistic information. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds observed 2 speakers whose utterances were syntactically accurate, but differed in lexical accuracy. All 4-year-olds used the speakers' accuracy to guide how they learned novel lexical information and novel irregular plurals, but not how they learned novel irregular past tense forms that children often regularize. These results suggest that when learning novel syntactic information, reliability information might interact with underlying linguistic regularity.
许多研究表明，幼儿在从他人那里学习新的词汇信息时，会依赖于这些人过去生成准确词汇信息的历史记录。本研究考察了儿童是否会利用说话者在某一类语言知识上的准确性来推断另一类语言知识，特别是在语法和词汇方面。在实验 1 中，我们向儿童呈现了 2 位说话者，他们在词汇方面非常准确，但在主谓一致的正确使用上有所不同。年长的 4 岁儿童，而不是年幼的 4 岁儿童，依赖准确的说话者来学习新的对象标签。我们认为，只有年长的 4 岁儿童可能已经注意到不准确的说话者是不可靠的新语言信息来源。在实验 2 中，4 岁儿童观察了 2 位说话者，他们的话语在语法上是准确的，但在词汇上有所不同。所有 4 岁儿童都利用说话者的准确性来指导他们学习新的词汇信息和新的不规则复数形式，但不能指导他们学习儿童经常规则化的新的不规则过去式形式。这些结果表明，在学习新的语法信息时，可靠性信息可能与潜在的语言规则相互作用。
