Byers-Heinlein Krista
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Canada.
Dev Sci. 2017 Jan;20(1). doi: 10.1111/desc.12486. Epub 2016 Nov 9.
Infants are precocious word learners, and seem to possess systematic expectations about how words refer to object kinds. For example, while monolingual infants show a one-to-one mapping bias (e.g. mutual exclusivity), expecting each object to have only one basic level label, previous research has shown that this is less robust in bi- and multilinguals aged 1.5 years and older. This study examined the early origins of such one-to-one mapping biases by comparing monolingual and bilingual 9-10-month-olds' expectations about the relationship between labels and object kinds. In a violation of expectation paradigm, infants heard a speaker name hidden objects with either one label ('I see a mouba! I see a mouba!') or two labels ('I see a camo! I see a tenda!'). An occluder moved to reveal two objects that were either identical or of different kinds. Monolingual infants looked longest when two labels were associated with identical objects, and when one label was associated with objects of different kinds, showing that they found these outcomes unexpected. This replicated previous findings showing that monolinguals expect that distinct words label distinct object kinds (Dewar & Xu, ). Bilinguals looked equally to the outcomes regardless of the number of labels, showing no such expectations. This finding indicates that bilingualism influences young infants' expectations about how words refer to kinds, and more broadly supports the position that language experience contributes to the development of word learning heuristics.
婴儿是早熟的词汇学习者，似乎对词汇如何指代物体类别有着系统的预期。例如，虽然单语婴儿表现出一对一映射偏差（如互斥性），即期望每个物体只有一个基本层次标签，但先前的研究表明，这种偏差在1.5岁及以上的双语和多语儿童中不太明显。本研究通过比较单语和双语9至10个月大婴儿对标签与物体类别之间关系的预期，考察了这种一对一映射偏差的早期根源。在一个违背预期的范式中，婴儿听到一个说话者用一个标签（“我看到一个穆巴！我看到一个穆巴！”）或两个标签（“我看到一个卡莫！我看到一个滕达！”）来称呼隐藏的物体。一个遮挡物移动以露出两个相同或不同种类的物体。当两个标签与相同物体相关联，以及一个标签与不同种类物体相关联时，单语婴儿注视的时间最长，这表明他们觉得这些结果出乎意料。这重复了先前的研究结果，即单语者期望不同的词汇指代不同种类的物体（杜瓦和徐， ）。无论标签数量如何，双语婴儿对这些结果的注视时间相同，没有表现出这样的预期。这一发现表明，双语会影响幼儿对词汇如何指代类别的预期，更广泛地支持了语言经验有助于词汇学习启发式发展的观点。
