Culbertson Jennifer, Koulaguina Elena, Gonzalez-Gomez Nayeli, Legendre Géraldine, Nazzi Thierry
School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh.
Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Université Paris Descartes.
Dev Psychol. 2016 Dec;52(12):2174-2183. doi: 10.1037/dev0000246.
Characterizing the nature of linguistic representations and how they emerge during early development is a central goal in the cognitive science of language. One area in which this development plays out is in the acquisition of dependencies-relationships between co-occurring elements in a word, phrase, or sentence. These dependencies often involve multiple levels of representation and abstraction, built up as infants gain experience with their native language. The authors used the Headturn Preference Procedure to systematically investigate the early acquisition of 1 such dependency, the agreement between a subject and verb in French, at 6 different ages between 14 and 24 months. The results reveal a complex developmental trajectory that provides the first evidence that infants might indeed progress through distinct stages in the acquisition of this nonadjacent dependency. The authors discuss how changes in general cognition and representational knowledge (from reflecting surface statistics to higher-level morphological features) might account for their findings. These findings highlight the importance of studying language acquisition at close time intervals over a substantial age range. (PsycINFO Database Record
刻画语言表征的本质以及它们在早期发展过程中是如何出现的，是语言认知科学的核心目标。这种发展呈现的一个领域是对依存关系的习得——单词、短语或句子中共同出现的元素之间的关系。这些依存关系通常涉及多个表征和抽象层次，随着婴儿对其母语的体验而逐渐形成。作者使用转头偏好程序，在14至24个月的6个不同年龄阶段，系统地研究了1种这样的依存关系，即法语中主语和动词的一致性。结果揭示了一条复杂的发展轨迹，首次证明婴儿在习得这种非相邻依存关系时可能确实会经历不同阶段。作者讨论了一般认知和表征知识的变化（从反映表面统计信息到更高层次的形态特征）如何解释他们的发现。这些发现凸显了在相当大的年龄范围内，以紧密的时间间隔研究语言习得的重要性。（《心理学文摘数据库记录》）
