School of Psychology, The University of Auckland.
Dev Psychol. 2013 Nov;49(11):2102-11. doi: 10.1037/a0031981. Epub 2013 Mar 4.
Object labels are valuable communicative tools because their meanings are shared among the members of a particular linguistic community. The current research was conducted to investigate whether 13-month-old infants appreciate that object labels should not be generalized across individuals who have been shown to speak different languages. Using a visual habituation paradigm, Experiment 1 tested whether infants would generalize a new object label that was taught to them by a speaker of a foreign language to a speaker from the infant's own linguistic group. The results suggest that infants do not expect 2 individuals who have been shown to speak different languages to use the same label to refer to the same object. The results of Experiment 2 reveal that infants do not generalize a new object label that was taught to them by a speaker of their native language to an individual who had been shown to speak a foreign language. These findings offer the first evidence that by the end of the 1st year of life, infants are sensitive to the fact that the conventional nature of language is constrained by the language that a person has been shown to speak.
对象标签是有价值的交际工具，因为它们的含义在特定语言社区的成员之间是共享的。本研究旨在调查 13 个月大的婴儿是否理解对象标签不应跨越被证明说不同语言的个体进行泛化。使用视觉习惯化范式，实验 1 检验了婴儿是否会将通过外语说话者教给他们的新对象标签泛化到婴儿自己语言群体的说话者。结果表明，婴儿不期望被证明说不同语言的 2 个人使用相同的标签来指代同一对象。实验 2 的结果表明，婴儿不会将母语说话者教给他们的新对象标签泛化到被证明说外语的个体。这些发现提供了第一个证据，表明在生命的第 1 年末，婴儿已经意识到语言的常规性质受到一个人被证明所说的语言的限制。
