Nappa Rebecca, Wessel Allison, McEldoon Katherine L, Gleitman Lila R, Trueswell John C
University of Pennsylvania.
Lang Learn Dev. 2009;5(4):203-234. doi: 10.1080/15475440903167528.
Speaker eye gaze and gesture are known to help child and adult listeners establish communicative alignment and learn object labels. Here we consider how learners use these cues, along with linguistic information, to acquire abstract relational verbs. Test items were perspective verb pairs (e.g., ), which pose a special problem for observational accounts of word learning because their situational contexts overlap very closely; the learner must infer the speaker's chosen perspective on the event. Two cues to the speaker's perspective on a depicted event were compared and combined: (a) the speaker's eye gaze to an event participant (e.g., looking at the Chaser vs. looking at the Flee-er) and (b) the speaker's linguistic choice of which event participant occupies Subject position in his utterance. Participants (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) were eye-tracked as they watched a series of videos of a man describing drawings of perspective events (e.g., a rabbit chasing an elephant). The speaker looked at one of the two characters and then uttered either an utterance that was referentially uninformative () or informative (/) because of the syntactic positioning of the nouns. Eye-tracking results showed that all participants regardless of age followed the speaker's gaze in both uninformative and informative contexts. However, verb-meaning choices were responsive to speaker's gaze direction only in the linguistically uninformative condition. In the presence of a linguistically informative context, effects of speaker gaze on meaning were minimal for the youngest children to nonexistent for the older populations. Thus children, like adults, can use multiple cues to inform verb-meaning choice but rapidly learn that the syntactic positioning of referring expressions is an especially informative source of evidence for these decisions.
众所周知，说话者的目光注视和手势有助于儿童及成年听众建立交流默契并学习物体标签。在此，我们探讨学习者如何利用这些线索以及语言信息来习得抽象关系动词。测试项目为视角动词对（例如），这类动词对词汇学习的观察性解释提出了一个特殊问题，因为它们的情境语境非常相近；学习者必须推断说话者对事件所选取的视角。我们对描绘事件时说话者视角的两种线索进行了比较和结合：（a）说话者对事件参与者的目光注视（例如，看向追逐者与看向逃跑者），以及（b）说话者在其话语中选择哪个事件参与者占据主语位置的语言选择。当参与者（3岁、4岁和5岁儿童）观看一系列男子描述视角事件图画（例如，一只兔子追逐一头大象）的视频时，对他们进行了眼动追踪。说话者看向两个角色中的一个，然后说出要么是指代性无信息的话语（），要么是由于名词的句法定位而具有信息性的话语（/）。眼动追踪结果显示所有参与者，无论年龄大小，在无信息和有信息的语境中都会跟随说话者的目光。然而，动词意义的选择仅在语言无信息的条件下对说话者的目光方向有反应。在存在语言信息的语境中，说话者目光对意义的影响对于最小的儿童来说很小，而对于年龄较大的群体则不存在。因此，儿童与成年人一样，可以利用多种线索来指导动词意义的选择，但很快就会了解到指代性表达的句法定位是这些决策的一个特别具有信息性的证据来源。
