Ambridge Ben, Bidgood Amy, Twomey Katherine E, Pine Julian M, Rowland Caroline F, Freudenthal Daniel
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom; ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD), Manchester, Liverpool and Lancaster, United Kingdom.
University of Lancaster, Lancaster, United Kingdom; ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD), Manchester, Liverpool and Lancaster, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2015 Apr 28;10(4):e0123723. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0123723. eCollection 2014.
Participants aged 5;2-6;8, 9;2-10;6 and 18;1-22;2 (72 at each age) rated verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., *Daddy giggled the baby) using a five-point scale. The study was designed to investigate the feasibility of two proposed construction-general solutions to the question of how children retreat from, or avoid, such errors. No support was found for the prediction of the preemption hypothesis that the greater the frequency of the verb in the single most nearly synonymous construction (for this example, the periphrastic causative; e.g., Daddy made the baby giggle), the lower the acceptability of the error. Support was found, however, for the prediction of the entrenchment hypothesis that the greater the overall frequency of the verb, regardless of construction, the lower the acceptability of the error, at least for the two older groups. Thus while entrenchment appears to be a robust solution to the problem of the retreat from error, and one that generalizes across different error types, we did not find evidence that this is the case for preemption. The implication is that the solution to the retreat from error lies not with specialized mechanisms, but rather in a probabilistic process of construction competition.
年龄在5岁2个月至6岁8个月、9岁2个月至10岁6个月以及18岁1个月至22岁2个月的参与者（每个年龄段各72人）使用五点量表对动词论元结构过度泛化错误（例如，*爸爸逗宝宝咯咯笑）进行评分。该研究旨在调查针对儿童如何从这类错误中退缩或避免这类错误这一问题所提出的两种构建通用解决方案的可行性。对于抢占假设的预测未得到支持，即动词在最相近的单一同义结构中出现的频率越高（对于此例，即迂回使役结构；例如，爸爸使宝宝咯咯笑），该错误的可接受性就越低。然而，对于强化假设的预测得到了支持，即至少对于两个年龄较大的组而言，无论结构如何，动词的总体出现频率越高，该错误的可接受性就越低。因此，虽然强化似乎是解决从错误中退缩问题的一个有力方案，且该方案能推广到不同的错误类型，但我们并未找到证据表明抢占也是如此。这意味着从错误中退缩的解决方案不在于专门的机制，而在于构建竞争的概率过程。
