Willits Jon A, Wojcik Erica H, Seidenberg Mark S, Saffran Jenny R
Department of Psychology University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Infancy. 2013 Nov;18(6). doi: 10.1111/infa.12026.
Language learners rapidly acquire extensive semantic knowledge, but the development of this knowledge is difficult to study, in part because it is difficult to assess young children's lexical semantic representations. In our studies, we solved this problem by investigating lexical semantic knowledge in 24-month-olds using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. In Experiment 1, looking times to a repeating spoken word stimulus (e.g., ) were shorter for trials preceded by a semantically related word (e.g., ) than trials preceded by an unrelated word (e.g., ). Experiment 2 yielded similar results using a method in which pairs of words were presented on the same trial. The studies provide evidence that young children activate of lexical semantic knowledge, and critically, that they do so in the absence of visual referents or sentence contexts. Auditory lexical priming is a promising technique for studying the development and structure of semantic knowledge in young children.
语言学习者能迅速获取广泛的语义知识，但这种知识的发展很难进行研究，部分原因是难以评估幼儿的词汇语义表征。在我们的研究中，我们通过使用转头偏好程序来调查24个月大婴儿的词汇语义知识，从而解决了这个问题。在实验1中，对于由语义相关词（例如 ）引导的试验，相比于由无关词（例如 ）引导的试验，对重复口语单词刺激（例如 ）的注视时间更短。实验2使用在同一试验中呈现单词对的方法也得出了类似结果。这些研究提供了证据，证明幼儿能够激活词汇语义知识，并且关键的是，他们在没有视觉参照物或句子语境的情况下就能做到这一点。听觉词汇启动是研究幼儿语义知识发展和结构的一种很有前景的技术。
