Meng Xianwei, Murakami Taro, Hashiya Kazuhide
Graduate School of Human-Environment Studies, Kyushu University, Fukuoka City, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan.
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo, Japan.
PLoS One. 2017 Oct 31;12(10):e0187368. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0187368. eCollection 2017.
Understanding the referent of other's utterance by referring the contextual information helps in smooth communication. Although this pragmatic referential process can be observed even in infants, its underlying mechanism and relative abilities remain unclear. This study aimed to comprehend the background of the referential process by investigating whether the phonological loop affected the referent assignment. A total of 76 children (43 girls) aged 3-5 years participated in a reference assignment task in which an experimenter asked them to answer explicit (e.g., "What color is this?") and ambiguous (e.g., "What about this?") questions about colorful objects. The phonological loop capacity was measured by using the forward digit span task in which children were required to repeat the numbers as an experimenter uttered them. The results showed that the scores of the forward digit span task positively predicted correct response to explicit questions and part of the ambiguous questions. That is, the phonological loop capacity did not have effects on referent assignment in response to ambiguous questions that were asked after a topic shift of the explicit questions and thus required a backward reference to the preceding explicit questions to detect the intent of the current ambiguous questions. These results suggest that although the phonological loop capacity could overtly enhance the storage of verbal information, it does not seem to directly contribute to the pragmatic referential process, which might require further social cognitive processes.
通过参考上下文信息来理解他人话语的所指有助于顺畅沟通。尽管即使在婴儿身上也能观察到这种语用指称过程，但其潜在机制和相关能力仍不清楚。本研究旨在通过调查语音回路是否影响所指分配来理解指称过程的背景。共有76名3至5岁的儿童（43名女孩）参与了一项所指分配任务，在该任务中，一名实验者要求他们回答关于彩色物体的明确问题（例如，“这是什么颜色？”）和模糊问题（例如，“这个呢？”）。语音回路容量通过前向数字广度任务来测量，在该任务中，要求儿童在实验者说出数字时重复这些数字。结果表明，前向数字广度任务的得分能正向预测对明确问题和部分模糊问题的正确回答。也就是说，语音回路容量对在明确问题主题转移后提出的模糊问题的所指分配没有影响，因此需要回溯到之前的明确问题以检测当前模糊问题的意图。这些结果表明，尽管语音回路容量可以明显增强言语信息的存储，但它似乎并没有直接促进语用指称过程，这可能需要进一步的社会认知过程。
