Jesse Alexandra, Johnson Elizabeth K
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario L5L 1C6, Canada.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2016 May;145:1-10. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2015.12.002. Epub 2016 Jan 5.
Analyses of caregiver-child communication suggest that an adult tends to highlight objects in a child's visual scene by moving them in a manner that is temporally aligned with the adult's speech productions. Here, we used the looking-while-listening paradigm to examine whether 25-month-olds use audiovisual temporal alignment to disambiguate and learn novel word-referent mappings in a difficult word-learning task. Videos of two equally interesting and animated novel objects were simultaneously presented to children, but the movement of only one of the objects was aligned with an accompanying object-labeling audio track. No social cues (e.g., pointing, eye gaze, touch) were available to the children because the speaker was edited out of the videos. Immediately afterward, toddlers were presented with still images of the two objects and asked to look at one or the other. Toddlers looked reliably longer to the labeled object, demonstrating their acquisition of the novel word-referent mapping. A control condition showed that children's performance was not solely due to the single unambiguous labeling that had occurred at experiment onset. We conclude that the temporal link between a speaker's utterances and the motion they imposed on the referent object helps toddlers to deduce a speaker's intended reference in a difficult word-learning scenario. In combination with our previous work, these findings suggest that intersensory redundancy is a source of information used by language users of all ages. That is, intersensory redundancy is not just a word-learning tool used by young infants.
对照顾者与儿童交流的分析表明，成年人倾向于通过以与自己言语表达在时间上同步的方式移动物体，来突出儿童视觉场景中的物体。在此，我们采用边听边看范式，以检验25个月大的幼儿在一项具有挑战性的词汇学习任务中，是否利用视听时间同步来消除歧义并学习新的词-物映射。两个同样有趣且生动的新奇物体的视频同时呈现给儿童，但只有其中一个物体的运动与伴随的物体标注音轨同步。由于说话者已从视频中剪辑掉，儿童无法获得任何社交线索（如指示、目光接触、触摸）。随后，马上向幼儿呈现这两个物体的静态图像，并要求他们看向其中一个。幼儿可靠地更长时间看向被标注的物体，表明他们习得了新的词-物映射。一个控制条件表明，儿童的表现并非仅仅归因于实验开始时出现的单一明确标注。我们得出结论，说话者的话语与他们施加在指称物体上的动作之间的时间联系，有助于幼儿在具有挑战性的词汇学习场景中推断说话者的意图指称。结合我们之前的研究工作，这些发现表明，跨感觉冗余是所有年龄段语言使用者所使用的信息来源。也就是说，跨感觉冗余不仅仅是幼儿使用的一种词汇学习工具。
