Monaghan Padraic
Centre for Research in Human Development and Learning, Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, UK.
Cognition. 2014 Dec;133(3):530-4. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.08.007. Epub 2014 Sep 14.
The processes taking place during language acquisition are proposed to influence language evolution. However, evidence demonstrating the link between language learning and language evolution is, at best, indirect, constituting studies of laboratory-based artificial language learning studies or computational simulations of diachronic change. In the current study, a direct link between acquisition and evolution is established, showing that for two hundred fundamental vocabulary items, the age at which words are acquired is a predictor of the rate at which they have changed in studies of language evolution. Early-acquired words are more salient and easier to process than late-acquired words, and these early-acquired words are also more stably represented within the community's language. Analysing the properties of these early-acquired words potentially provides insight into the origins of communication, highlighting features of words that have been ultra-conserved in language.
语言习得过程被认为会影响语言进化。然而，证明语言学习与语言进化之间联系的证据，充其量只是间接的，包括基于实验室的人工语言学习研究或历时变化的计算模拟研究。在当前的研究中，建立了习得与进化之间的直接联系，表明对于两百个基本词汇项目，习得这些词汇的年龄是它们在语言进化研究中变化速率的一个预测指标。早期习得的词汇比晚期习得的词汇更突出、更易于处理，并且这些早期习得的词汇在社群语言中也有更稳定的表现。分析这些早期习得词汇的特性可能会为交流的起源提供见解，突出语言中一直极度保守的词汇特征。
