Feijoo Sara, Muñoz Carmen, Amadó Anna, Serrat Elisabet
Department of Modern Languages and English Studies, University of BarcelonaBarcelona, Spain.
Department of Psychology, University of GironaGirona, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jul 19;8:1242. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01242. eCollection 2017.
One of the most important tasks in first language development is assigning words to their grammatical category. The postulates that, in order to accomplish this task, children are guided by a neat correspondence between semantic and grammatical categories, since nouns typically refer to objects and verbs to actions. It is this correspondence that guides children's initial word categorization. Other approaches, on the other hand, suggest that children might make use of distributional cues and word contexts to accomplish the word categorization task. According to such approaches, the assumption offers an important limitation, as it might not be true that all the nouns that children hear refer to specific objects or people. In order to explore that, we carried out two studies based on analyses of children's linguistic input. We analyzed child-directed speech addressed to four children under the age of 2;6, taken from the CHILDES database. The corpora were selected from the Manchester corpus. The corpora from the four selected children contained a total of 10,681 word types and 364,196 word tokens. In our first study, discriminant analyses were performed using semantic cues alone. The results show that many of the nouns found in parents' speech do not relate to specific objects and that semantic information alone might not be sufficient for successful word categorization. Given that there must be an additional source of information which, alongside with semantics, might assist young learners in word categorization, our second study explores the availability of both distributional and semantic cues in child-directed speech. Our results confirm that this combination might yield better results for word categorization. These results are in line with theories that suggest the need for an integration of multiple cues from different sources in language development.
第一语言发展中最重要的任务之一是将单词归入其语法类别。该理论假设，为了完成这项任务，儿童会受到语义和语法类别之间精确对应关系的引导，因为名词通常指代物体，动词指代动作。正是这种对应关系引导着儿童最初的单词分类。另一方面，其他方法表明，儿童可能会利用分布线索和单词上下文来完成单词分类任务。根据这些方法，上述假设存在一个重要局限性，因为儿童听到的所有名词都指代特定物体或人物这一点可能并不正确。为了探究这一点，我们基于对儿童语言输入的分析进行了两项研究。我们分析了从儿童语言数据交换系统（CHILDES）数据库中获取的针对四名2岁6个月以下儿童的儿童导向型言语。语料库选自曼彻斯特语料库。从这四名选定儿童的语料库中总共包含10681个单词类型和364196个单词实例。在我们的第一项研究中，仅使用语义线索进行判别分析。结果表明，在父母言语中发现的许多名词与特定物体并无关联，仅靠语义信息可能不足以成功进行单词分类。鉴于必定存在一种额外的信息来源，它与语义一起可能会帮助年幼学习者进行单词分类，我们的第二项研究探讨了儿童导向型言语中分布线索和语义线索的可用性。我们的结果证实，这种组合可能会在单词分类方面产生更好的结果。这些结果与一些理论相符，这些理论表明在语言发展中需要整合来自不同来源的多种线索。
