Nowak Iga, Baggio Giosuè
Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2017 Oct 17;8:1816. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01816. eCollection 2017.
Human learning, although highly flexible and efficient, is constrained in ways that facilitate or impede the acquisition of certain systems of information. Some such constraints, active during infancy and childhood, have been proposed to account for the apparent ease with which typically developing children acquire language. In a series of experiments, we investigated the role of developmental constraints on learning artificial grammars with a distinction between shorter and relatively frequent words ('function words,' F-words) and longer and less frequent words ('content words,' C-words). We constructed 4 finite-state grammars, in which the order of F-words, relative to C-words, was either (F-words always occupied the same positions in a string), (every F-word always followed a C-word), or . We exposed adults ( = 84) and kindergarten children ( = 100) to strings from each of these artificial grammars, and we assessed their ability to recognize strings with the same structure, but a different vocabulary. Adults were better at recognizing strings when regularities were available (i.e., fixed and flexible order grammars), while children were better at recognizing strings from the grammars consistent with the attested distribution of function and content words in natural languages (i.e., flexible and free order grammars). These results provide evidence for a link between developmental constraints on learning and linguistic typology.
人类学习虽然具有高度的灵活性和效率，但在促进或阻碍某些信息系统获取的方式上受到限制。有人提出，在婴儿期和儿童期起作用的一些此类限制，可以解释典型发育儿童习得语言时明显的轻松程度。在一系列实验中，我们研究了发展限制在学习人工语法中的作用，区分了较短且相对频繁的词（“功能词”，F 词）和较长且不太频繁的词（“内容词”，C 词）。我们构建了 4 种有限状态语法，其中 F 词相对于 C 词的顺序要么是 （F 词在字符串中总是占据相同位置），要么是 （每个 F 词总是跟在一个 C 词之后），要么是 。我们让成年人（n = 84）和幼儿园儿童（n = 100）接触这些人工语法中的每一种语法生成的字符串，并评估他们识别具有相同结构但不同词汇的字符串的能力。当存在规律时（即固定顺序和灵活顺序语法），成年人在识别字符串方面表现更好，而儿童在识别与自然语言中功能词和内容词的已证实分布一致的语法生成的字符串方面表现更好（即灵活顺序和自由顺序语法）。这些结果为学习中的发展限制与语言类型学之间的联系提供了证据。
