Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2019 Feb;178:41-59. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.09.004. Epub 2018 Oct 13.
This investigation examined how prototypicality affects mother-child communication about relative proximity. In the first two experiments, mothers of 2.5-, 3.0-, and 3.5-year-old children verbally disambiguated a target hiding container from an identical non-target hiding container when the two containers were placed at a smaller (more prototypical) or larger (less prototypical) distance from a landmark. Children then searched for the hidden object. When the absolute distance was smaller, mothers used more consistent frames of reference in their directions and even 2.5-year-olds largely followed those directions successfully. When the absolute distance was larger, mothers used multiple reference frames in their directions (a "kitchen sink" strategy) and children had more difficulty in following directions (especially 2.5-year-olds). A third experiment in which we controlled mothers' directions confirmed that the increased absolute distance, and not the mothers' direction-giving strategies, led to 2.5-year-olds' impaired search performance. These results indicate that young children's understanding of relative proximity develops from more prototypical cases (smaller distances) to less prototypical cases (larger distances) and that mothers' attempts to compensate for young children's difficulty with less prototypical cases did not improve their search performance.
本研究考察了典型性如何影响母子之间关于相对接近程度的交流。在前两个实验中，当两个容器与地标之间的距离较小时（更典型）或较大时（不那么典型），2.5 岁、3.0 岁和 3.5 岁儿童的母亲用言语从一个相同的非目标隐藏容器中区分出目标隐藏容器。然后，孩子们寻找隐藏的物体。当绝对距离较小时，母亲在指导中使用了更一致的参照系，甚至 2.5 岁的孩子也能很大程度上成功地遵循这些指导。当绝对距离较大时，母亲在指导中使用了多个参照系（“厨房水槽”策略），孩子们在遵循指导方面遇到了更多困难（尤其是 2.5 岁的孩子）。第三个实验中，我们控制了母亲的指导方向，证实了是增加的绝对距离而不是母亲的指导策略导致了 2.5 岁孩子搜索表现的受损。这些结果表明，幼儿对相对接近程度的理解是从更典型的情况（较小的距离）发展到不那么典型的情况（较大的距离），并且母亲试图弥补幼儿对不那么典型情况的理解困难并没有提高他们的搜索表现。
