Yurovsky Daniel, Frank Michael C
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, USA.
Dev Sci. 2017 Mar;20(2). doi: 10.1111/desc.12349. Epub 2015 Nov 17.
Children learn their earliest words through social interaction, but it is unknown how much they rely on social information. Some theories argue that word learning is fundamentally social from its outset, with even the youngest infants understanding intentions and using them to infer a social partner's target of reference. In contrast, other theories argue that early word learning is largely a perceptual process in which young children map words onto salient objects. One way of unifying these accounts is to model word learning as weighted cue combination, in which children attend to many potential cues to reference, but only gradually learn the correct weight to assign each cue. We tested four predictions of this kind of naïve cue combination account, using an eye-tracking paradigm that combines social word teaching and two-alternative forced-choice testing. None of the predictions were supported. We thus propose an alternative unifying account: children are sensitive to social information early, but their ability to gather and deploy this information is constrained by domain-general cognitive processes. Developmental changes in children's use of social cues emerge not from learning the predictive power of social cues, but from the gradual development of attention, memory, and speed of information processing.
儿童通过社会互动学习他们最早的词汇，但尚不清楚他们在多大程度上依赖社会信息。一些理论认为，词汇学习从一开始本质上就是社会性的，甚至最小的婴儿也能理解意图，并利用意图来推断社会伙伴的指称对象。相比之下，其他理论认为，早期词汇学习很大程度上是一个感知过程，幼儿将词汇映射到突出的物体上。统一这些观点的一种方法是将词汇学习建模为加权线索组合，即儿童关注许多潜在的指称线索，但只是逐渐学会为每个线索赋予正确的权重。我们使用一种结合了社会词汇教学和二选一强制选择测试的眼动追踪范式，对这种朴素线索组合观点的四个预测进行了测试。没有一个预测得到支持。因此，我们提出了另一种统一观点：儿童早期对社会信息敏感，但他们收集和运用这些信息的能力受到一般领域认知过程的限制。儿童使用社会线索的发展变化并非源于学习社会线索的预测能力，而是源于注意力、记忆力和信息处理速度的逐渐发展。
