Marušič Franc, Žaucer Rok, Plesničar Vesna, Razboršek Tina, Sullivan Jessica, Barner David
Center for Cognitive Science of Language, University of Nova Gorica, Nova Gorica, Slovenia.
Department of Psychology, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2016 Aug 3;11(8):e0159208. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0159208. eCollection 2016.
How does linguistic structure affect children's acquisition of early number word meanings? Previous studies have tested this question by comparing how children learning languages with different grammatical representations of number learn the meanings of labels for small numbers, like 1, 2, and 3. For example, children who acquire a language with singular-plural marking, like English, are faster to learn the word for 1 than children learning a language that lacks the singular-plural distinction, perhaps because the word for 1 is always used in singular contexts, highlighting its meaning. These studies are problematic, however, because reported differences in number word learning may be due to unmeasured cross-cultural differences rather than specific linguistic differences. To address this problem, we investigated number word learning in four groups of children from a single culture who spoke different dialects of the same language that differed chiefly with respect to how they grammatically mark number. We found that learning a dialect which features "dual" morphology (marking of pairs) accelerated children's acquisition of the number word two relative to learning a "non-dual" dialect of the same language.
语言结构如何影响儿童对早期数字单词含义的习得？以往的研究通过比较学习具有不同数字语法表征的语言的儿童如何学习小数目的标签（如1、2和3）的含义来检验这个问题。例如，习得具有单复数标记的语言（如英语）的儿童比学习缺乏单复数区分的语言的儿童更快学会表示1的单词，这可能是因为表示1的单词总是用于单数语境，突出了它的含义。然而，这些研究存在问题，因为报告的数字单词学习差异可能是由于未测量的跨文化差异而非特定的语言差异所致。为了解决这个问题，我们调查了来自单一文化的四组儿童的数字单词学习情况，这些儿童说同一种语言的不同方言，主要区别在于它们在语法上标记数字的方式。我们发现，相对于学习同一种语言的“非双数”方言，学习具有“双数”形态（对的标记）的方言加速了儿童对数字单词“二”的习得。
