Csibra Gergely, Shamsudheen Rubeena
Cognitive Development Center, Central European University, Budapest 1051 Hungary; email:
Annu Rev Psychol. 2015 Jan 3;66:689-710. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015232. Epub 2014 Sep 12.
Human infants are involved in communicative interactions with others well before they start to speak or understand language. It is generally thought that this communication is useful for establishing interpersonal relations and supporting joint activities, but, in the absence of symbolic functions that language provides, these early communicative contexts do not allow infants to learn about the world. However, recent studies suggest that when someone demonstrates something using an object as the medium of instruction, infants can conceive the object as an exemplar of the whole class of objects of the same kind. Thus, an object, just like a word, can play the role of a symbol that stands for something else than itself, and infants can learn general knowledge about a kind of object from nonverbal communication about a single item of that kind. This rudimentary symbolic capacity may be one of the roots of the development of symbolic understanding in children.
人类婴儿在开始说话或理解语言之前很久就参与了与他人的交流互动。人们普遍认为，这种交流对于建立人际关系和支持共同活动很有用，但是，由于缺乏语言所提供的符号功能，这些早期的交流情境并不能让婴儿了解世界。然而，最近的研究表明，当有人以某个物体作为教学媒介来演示某样东西时，婴儿能够将该物体视为同类物体整个类别中的一个范例。因此，一个物体就像一个单词一样，可以起到代表除自身之外其他事物的符号作用，并且婴儿可以从关于某类单一物品的非语言交流中学习关于该类物体的一般知识。这种基本的符号能力可能是儿童符号理解发展的根源之一。
