University of Nevada, Las Vegas, United States.
University of Pennsylvania, United States.
Cogn Psychol. 2019 Nov;114:101226. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2019.101226. Epub 2019 Jul 13.
Even when children encounter a novel word in the situation of a clear and unique referent, they are nevertheless faced with the problem of semantic uncertainty: when "puziv" refers to a co-present spotted dog, does the word mean Fido, Dalmatian, dog, animal, or entity? Here we explored the extent to which children (3-5 years of age) can reason about a novel word's meaning from information they have gathered cross-situationally, from a series of simple ostensive labeling events ("I see a puziv!"). Of particular interest were the conditions under which children arrive at a subordinate level meaning (e.g., Dalmatian) rather than a basic level meaning (e.g., dog). Experiment 1 showed that children (N = 32) were capable of using lexical contrast and/or mutual exclusivity cross-situationally, such that they arrived at subordinate level meanings only when the words being learned contrasted at the subordinate level, otherwise they strongly preferred basic level meanings (e.g., dog) even when the word had previously referred to subordinate level exemplars (always Dalmatians). Experiment 2 showed that some children in this same age range (N = 20) can also arrive at subordinate level meanings cross-situationally when offered relatively minimal linguistic support ("It's a kind of dog."). The findings are interpreted with respect to current theories of cross-situational word learning, and suggest that word meanings rather than sets of referential exemplars are tracked and used for cross-situational comparison.
即使儿童在有明确独特指涉物的情况下遇到生词，他们仍然面临语义不确定性的问题：当“puziv”指的是一只同时出现的斑点狗时，这个词是指 Fido、斑点狗、狗、动物还是实体？在这里，我们探讨了 3-5 岁的儿童在多大程度上可以根据跨情境收集到的信息来推理一个新词的含义，这些信息来自一系列简单的明示标记事件（“我看到一只 puziv！”）。特别感兴趣的是儿童在什么条件下可以得出下位词义（例如，斑点狗），而不是基本词义（例如，狗）。实验 1 表明，儿童（N=32）能够跨情境使用词汇对比和/或互斥性，因此只有当所学的词在下位层面上形成对比时，他们才会得出下位词义，否则他们更倾向于基本词义（例如，狗），即使这个词之前指的是下位层面的示例（总是斑点狗）。实验 2 表明，在这个相同年龄段的一些儿童（N=20），在提供相对较少的语言支持（“这是一种狗。”）的情况下，也可以跨情境得出下位词义。研究结果结合了当前的跨情境词汇学习理论进行了解释，并表明是词义而不是指涉示例集被跟踪并用于跨情境比较。
