School of Psychology, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK.
Language and Cognition, Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2018 Aug 5;373(1752). doi: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0140.
Some explanations of abstract word learning suggest that these words are learnt primarily from the linguistic input, using statistical co-occurrences of words in language, whereas concrete words can also rely on non-linguistic, experiential information. According to this hypothesis, we expect that, if the learner is not able to fully exploit the information in the linguistic input, abstract words should be affected more than concrete ones. Embodied approaches instead argue that both abstract and concrete words can rely on experiential information and, therefore, there might not be any linguistic primacy. Here, we test the role of linguistic input in the development of abstract knowledge with children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing children aged 8-13. We show that DLD children, who by definition have impoverished language, do not show a disproportionate impairment for abstract words in lexical decision and definition tasks. These results indicate that linguistic information does not have a primary role in the learning of abstract concepts and words; rather, it would play a significant role in semantic development across all domains of knowledge.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.
有些关于抽象词汇学习的解释表明，这些词汇主要是通过语言输入学习的，利用语言中词汇的统计共现，而具体词汇也可以依赖非语言的经验信息。根据这一假设，我们预计，如果学习者不能充分利用语言输入中的信息，抽象词汇受到的影响应该比具体词汇更大。而具身认知方法则认为，抽象和具体词汇都可以依赖经验信息，因此，语言可能没有优先权。在这里，我们用发展性语言障碍（DLD）儿童和 8-13 岁的正常发育儿童来测试语言输入在抽象知识发展中的作用。我们发现，根据定义语言能力较差的 DLD 儿童在词汇判断和定义任务中，并没有表现出对抽象词汇的不成比例的损伤。这些结果表明，语言信息在抽象概念和词汇的学习中没有主要作用；相反，它在所有知识领域的语义发展中都将发挥重要作用。本文是“抽象概念的多样性：大脑中的发展、使用和表现”主题特刊的一部分。
