Bergelson Elika, Aslin Richard
Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Center for Language Sciences.
Psychology & Neuroscience Department, Duke University.
Lang Learn Dev. 2017;13(4):481-501. doi: 10.1080/15475441.2017.1324308. Epub 2017 Jun 30.
The present study investigated infants' knowledge about familiar nouns. Infants (n = 46, 12-20-month-olds) saw two-image displays of familiar objects, or one familiar and one novel object. Infants heard either a matching word (e.g. "foot' when seeing foot and juice), a related word (e.g. "sock" when seeing foot and juice) or a nonce word (e.g. "fep" when seeing a novel object and dog). Across the whole sample, infants reliably fixated the referent on matching and nonce trials. On the critical related trials we found increasingly less looking to the incorrect (but related) image with age. These results suggest that one-year-olds look at familiar objects both when they hear them labeled and when they hear related labels, to similar degrees, but over the second year increasingly rely on semantic fit. We suggest that infants' initial semantic representations are imprecise, and continue to sharpen over the second postnatal year.
本研究调查了婴儿对熟悉名词的认知。婴儿（n = 46，12至20个月大）观看了熟悉物体的双图像展示，或一个熟悉物体和一个新物体的展示。婴儿听到的要么是匹配的单词（例如，看到脚和果汁时听到“脚”）、相关的单词（例如，看到脚和果汁时听到“袜子”），要么是无意义的单词（例如，看到新物体和狗时听到“fep”）。在整个样本中，婴儿在匹配和无意义试验中可靠地注视了指称对象。在关键的相关试验中，我们发现随着年龄的增长，看向不正确（但相关）图像的次数越来越少。这些结果表明，一岁大的婴儿在听到熟悉物体被标记以及听到相关标签时，看向熟悉物体的程度相似，但在第二年，他们越来越依赖语义匹配。我们认为婴儿最初的语义表征是不精确的，并且在出生后的第二年仍在不断完善。
