Delle Luche Claire, Durrant Samantha, Floccia Caroline, Plunkett Kim
School of Psychology, Plymouth University, UK.
Dev Sci. 2014 Nov;17(6):948-55. doi: 10.1111/desc.12164. Epub 2014 Mar 13.
A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that infants understand the meaning of spoken words from as early as 6 months. Yet little is known about their ability to do so in the absence of any visual referent, which would offer diagnostic evidence for an adult-like, symbolic interpretation of words and their use in language mediated thought. We used the head-turn preference procedure to examine whether infants can generate implicit meanings from word forms alone as early as 18 months of age, and whether they are sensitive to meaningful relationships between words. In one condition, toddlers were presented with lists of words taken from the same taxonomic category (e.g. animals or body parts). In a second condition, words taken from two other categories (e.g. clothes and food items) were interleaved within the same list. Listening times were found to be longer in the related-category condition than in the mixed-category condition, suggesting that infants extract the meaning of spoken words and are sensitive to the semantic relatedness between these words. Our results show that infants have begun to construct the rudiments of a semantic system based on taxonomic relations even before they enter a period of accelerated vocabulary growth.
大量证据表明，婴儿早在6个月大时就理解了口语单词的含义。然而，对于他们在没有任何视觉参照的情况下理解单词含义的能力，我们却知之甚少。而视觉参照能为类似成人的、对单词及其在语言介导思维中的使用的象征性解释提供诊断证据。我们使用转头偏好程序来研究婴儿是否早在18个月大时就能仅从单词形式中生成隐含意义，以及他们是否对单词之间的有意义关系敏感。在一种情况下，向幼儿呈现取自同一分类类别的单词列表（例如动物或身体部位）。在另一种情况下，取自其他两个类别的单词（例如衣服和食品）在同一列表中交错排列。结果发现，相关类别条件下的聆听时间比混合类别条件下的更长，这表明婴儿能够提取口语单词的含义，并对这些单词之间的语义相关性敏感。我们的研究结果表明，婴儿甚至在进入词汇加速增长期之前，就已经开始基于分类关系构建语义系统的雏形。
