Borovsky Arielle, Sweeney Kim, Elman Jeffrey L, Fernald Anne
Department of Psychology, Florida State University.
Center for Research in Language, University of California, San Diego, CA.
J Mem Lang. 2014 May 1;73:1-14. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2014.02.001.
Despite extensive evidence that adults and children rapidly integrate world knowledge to generate expectancies for upcoming language, little work has explored how this knowledge is initially acquired and used. We explore this question in 3- to 10-year-old children and adults by measuring the degree to which sentences depicting recently learned connections between agents, actions and objects lead to anticipatory eye-movements to the objects. Combinatory information in sentences about agent and action elicited anticipatory eye-movements to the Target object in adults and older children. Our findings suggest that adults and school-aged children can quickly activate information about recently exposed novel event relationships in real-time language processing. However, there were important developmental differences in the use of this knowledge. Adults and school-aged children used the sentential agent and action to predict the sentence final theme, while preschool children's fixations reflected a simple association to the currently spoken item. We consider several reasons for this developmental difference and possible extensions of this paradigm.
尽管有大量证据表明，成人和儿童会迅速整合世界知识，以便对即将出现的语言产生预期，但很少有研究探讨这些知识最初是如何获得和使用的。我们通过测量描述主体、动作和物体之间最近学到的联系的句子导致对物体的预期眼动的程度，来研究3至10岁儿童和成人中的这个问题。关于主体和动作的句子中的组合信息在成人和年龄较大的儿童中引发了对目标物体的预期眼动。我们的研究结果表明，成人和学龄儿童在实时语言处理中可以快速激活有关最近接触到的新事件关系的信息。然而，在这种知识的使用上存在重要的发展差异。成人和学龄儿童使用句子中的主体和动作来预测句子最后的主题，而学龄前儿童的注视反映了与当前所说项目的简单关联。我们考虑了造成这种发展差异的几个原因以及这种范式可能的扩展。
