Childers Jane B
Trinity University, Department of Psychology, One Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX 78212.
First Lang. 2011 Feb 1;31(1). doi: 10.1177/0142723710361825.
An important question in verb learning is how children extend new verbs to new situational contexts. In Study 1, 2 1/2-year-old children were shown a complex event followed by new events that preserved only the action from the initial event, only the result, or no new events. Children seeing events that preserved either the action or the result produced appropriate verb extensions at test while children without this information did not. In a follow-up study, children hearing new verbs produced more extensions than did children hearing nonlabeling speech. These studies suggest that attention to related events is helpful to young verb learners, perhaps because they structurally align these events (e.g., Gentner, 1983; 1989) during verb learning.
动词学习中的一个重要问题是儿童如何将新动词扩展到新的情境中。在研究1中，向2.5岁的儿童展示了一个复杂事件，随后是新事件，这些新事件要么只保留了初始事件中的动作，要么只保留了结果，要么没有新事件。看到保留了动作或结果的事件的儿童在测试中产生了适当的动词扩展，而没有这些信息的儿童则没有。在一项后续研究中，听到新动词的儿童比听到无标签语音的儿童产生了更多的扩展。这些研究表明，关注相关事件对年幼的动词学习者有帮助，这可能是因为他们在动词学习过程中对这些事件进行了结构对齐（例如，Gentner，1983；1989）。
