Harris Paul L, Bartz Deborah T, Rowe Meredith L
Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138
Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Jul 25;114(30):7884-7891. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1620745114. Epub 2017 Jul 24.
Children acquire information, especially about the culture in which they are being raised, by listening to other people. Recent evidence has shown that young children are selective learners who preferentially accept information, especially from informants who are likely to be representative of the surrounding culture. However, the extent to which children understand this process of information transmission and actively exploit it to fill gaps in their knowledge has not been systematically investigated. We review evidence that toddlers exhibit various expressive behaviors when faced with knowledge gaps. They look toward an available adult, convey ignorance via nonverbal gestures (flips/shrugs), and increasingly produce verbal acknowledgments of ignorance ("I don't know"). They also produce comments and questions about what their interlocutors might know and adopt an interrogative stance toward them. Thus, in the second and third years, children actively seek information from interlocutors via nonverbal gestures or verbal questions and display a heightened tendency to encode and retain such sought-after information.
儿童通过倾听他人来获取信息，尤其是关于他们成长环境中的文化信息。最近的证据表明，幼儿是有选择性的学习者，他们优先接受信息，特别是来自可能代表周围文化的信息提供者的信息。然而，儿童在多大程度上理解这种信息传递过程并积极利用它来填补知识空白，尚未得到系统的研究。我们回顾了相关证据，即幼儿在面对知识空白时会表现出各种表达行为。他们会看向在场的成年人，通过非语言手势（翻动/耸肩）传达自己的无知，并且越来越多地用语言表达自己的无知（“我不知道”）。他们还会对对话者可能知道的事情发表评论和提问，并对他们采取询问的态度。因此，在两岁和三岁时，儿童会通过非语言手势或语言问题积极地向对话者寻求信息，并表现出更强的倾向来编码和保留这些所寻求的信息。
