Ganea Patricia A, Fitch Allison, Harris Paul L, Kaldy Zsuzsa
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G3, Canada.
University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA 02125, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2016 Nov;151:65-76. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2015.12.005. Epub 2016 Jan 28.
The capacity to use language to form new representations and to revise existing knowledge is a crucial aspect of human cognition. Here we examined whether infants can use language to adjust their representation of a recently encoded scene. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we asked whether 16-month-old infants (N=26; mean age=16;0 [months;days], range=14;15-17;15) can use language about an occluded event to inform their expectation about what the world will look like when the occluder is removed. We compared looking time to outcome scenes that matched the language input with looking time to those that did not. Infants looked significantly longer at the event outcome when the outcome did not match the language input, suggesting that they generated an expectation of the outcome based on that input alone. This effect was unrelated to infants' vocabulary size. Thus, using language to adjust expectations about the visual world is present at an early developmental stage even when language skills are rudimentary.
运用语言形成新表征并修正现有知识的能力是人类认知的一个关键方面。在此，我们探究了婴儿是否能够运用语言来调整他们对近期编码场景的表征。采用眼动追踪范式，我们询问16个月大的婴儿（N = 26；平均年龄 = 16；0 [月；天]，范围 = 14；15 - 17；15）是否能够使用关于一个被遮挡事件的语言来形成他们对遮挡物移除后世界模样的预期。我们将与语言输入匹配的结果场景的注视时间与不匹配的结果场景的注视时间进行了比较。当结果与语言输入不匹配时，婴儿对事件结果的注视时间显著更长，这表明他们仅基于该输入就对结果产生了预期。这种效应与婴儿的词汇量无关。因此，即使语言技能尚不完善，在早期发育阶段就已存在运用语言来调整对视觉世界预期的现象。
