Rissman Lilia, Goldin-Meadow Susan
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago.
Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language, University of Chicago.
Lang Learn Dev. 2017;13(3):286-299. doi: 10.1080/15475441.2016.1254633. Epub 2017 Jan 4.
Across a diverse range of languages, children proceed through similar stages in their production of causal language: their initial verbs lack internal causal structure, followed by a period during which they produce causative overgeneralizations, indicating knowledge of a productive causative rule. We asked in this study whether a child not exposed to structured linguistic input could create linguistic devices for encoding causation and, if so, whether the emergence of this causal language would follow a trajectory similar to the one observed for children learning language from linguistic input. We show that the child in our study did develop causation-encoding morphology, but only after initially using verbs that lacked internal causal structure. These results suggest that the ability to encode causation linguistically can emerge in the absence of a language model, and that exposure to linguistic input is not the only factor guiding children from one stage to the next in their production of causal language.
在多种语言中，儿童在因果语言表达上会经历相似的阶段：他们最初使用的动词缺乏内部因果结构，随后会进入一个过度泛化使役动词的阶段，这表明他们掌握了一种生成性的使役规则。在本研究中，我们探讨了一个未接触过结构化语言输入的儿童是否能够创造出用于编码因果关系的语言手段，如果可以，这种因果语言的出现是否会遵循与从语言输入中学习语言的儿童所观察到的轨迹相似的轨迹。我们发现，我们研究中的儿童确实发展出了编码因果关系的形态，但这是在最初使用缺乏内部因果结构的动词之后。这些结果表明，在没有语言模型的情况下，语言编码因果关系的能力也可能出现，并且接触语言输入并不是引导儿童在因果语言表达中从一个阶段过渡到下一个阶段的唯一因素。
