Twomey Katherine E, Westermann Gert
Department of Psychology Lancaster University.
Infancy. 2018 Jan-Feb;23(1):61-73. doi: 10.1111/infa.12201. Epub 2017 Jul 5.
Infants rapidly learn both linguistic and nonlinguistic representations of their environment and begin to link these from around 6 months. While there is an increasing body of evidence for the effect of labels heard in-task on infants' online processing, whether infants' learned linguistic representations shape learned nonlinguistic representations is unclear. In this study 10-month-old infants were trained over the course of a week with two 3D objects, one labeled, and one unlabeled. Infants then took part in a looking time task in which 2D images of the objects were presented individually in a silent familiarization phase, followed by a preferential looking trial. During the critical familiarization phase, infants looked for longer at the previously labeled stimulus than the unlabeled stimulus, suggesting that learning a label for an object had shaped infants' representations as indexed by looking times. We interpret these results in terms of label activation and novelty response accounts and discuss implications for our understanding of early representational development.
婴儿能迅速学习其周围环境的语言和非语言表征，并在大约6个月大时开始将这些表征联系起来。虽然越来越多的证据表明任务中听到的标签对婴儿的在线处理有影响，但婴儿所学的语言表征是否会塑造所学的非语言表征尚不清楚。在这项研究中，10个月大的婴儿在一周的时间里接受了两个3D物体的训练，一个有标签，一个没有标签。然后，婴儿参加了一个注视时间任务，在这个任务中，物体的二维图像在一个无声的熟悉阶段单独呈现，随后是一个偏好注视试验。在关键的熟悉阶段，婴儿对之前有标签的刺激物的注视时间比对无标签刺激物的注视时间更长，这表明为一个物体学习一个标签已经塑造了婴儿以注视时间为指标的表征。我们根据标签激活和新奇反应理论来解释这些结果，并讨论其对我们理解早期表征发展的意义。
