Caselli Naomi K, Pyers Jennie E
1 School of Education, Boston University.
2 Psychology Department, Wellesley College.
Psychol Sci. 2017 Jul;28(7):979-987. doi: 10.1177/0956797617700498. Epub 2017 May 30.
Iconic mappings between words and their meanings are far more prevalent than once estimated and seem to support children's acquisition of new words, spoken or signed. We asked whether iconicity's prevalence in sign language overshadows two other factors known to support the acquisition of spoken vocabulary: neighborhood density (the number of lexical items phonologically similar to the target) and lexical frequency. Using mixed-effects logistic regressions, we reanalyzed 58 parental reports of native-signing deaf children's productive acquisition of 332 signs in American Sign Language (ASL; Anderson & Reilly, 2002) and found that iconicity, neighborhood density, and lexical frequency independently facilitated vocabulary acquisition. Despite differences in iconicity and phonological structure between signed and spoken language, signing children, like children learning a spoken language, track statistical information about lexical items and their phonological properties and leverage this information to expand their vocabulary.
词汇与其意义之间的象似映射比之前估计的更为普遍，似乎有助于儿童习得新的口语或手语词汇。我们探讨了手语中象似性的普遍性是否掩盖了另外两个已知有助于口语词汇习得的因素：邻域密度（语音上与目标词相似的词汇项目数量）和词汇频率。通过混合效应逻辑回归，我们重新分析了58份关于以手语为母语的聋儿在美国手语（ASL；Anderson & Reilly，2002）中对332个手语的产出性习得的家长报告，发现象似性、邻域密度和词汇频率都独立促进了词汇习得。尽管手语和口语在象似性和语音结构上存在差异，但像学习口语的儿童一样，使用手语的儿童也会追踪有关词汇项目及其语音属性的统计信息，并利用这些信息来扩大词汇量。
