Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (INCC UMR8002), Université Paris Descartes, 45 rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris, France; Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (INCC UMR8002), CNRS, 45 rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris, France.
Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (INCC UMR8002), Université Paris Descartes, 45 rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris, France; Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (INCC UMR8002), CNRS, 45 rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris, France.
Curr Biol. 2020 Apr 20;30(8):1380-1386.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.070. Epub 2020 Mar 12.
The linguistic distinction between function words (functors) (e.g., the, he, that, on…), signaling grammatical structure, and content words (e.g., house, blue, carry…), carrying meaning, is universal across the languages of the world. These two lexical categories also differ in their phonological makeup (functors being shorter and more minimal) and frequency of occurrence (individual functors being much more frequent than most content words). The frequency-based discrimination of the two categories could constitute a powerful mechanism for infants to acquire the basic building blocks of language. As functors constitute closed classes and content words come in open classes, we examined whether 8-month-old monolingual infants relied on word frequency to categorize and track functors and content words. In six artificial grammar-learning experiments, we have found that infants process frequent words as belonging to closed classes, and infrequent words as belonging to open classes, and they map the relative order of these categories following the basic word order of their native language. These findings provide the earliest evidence that infants use word frequency as a cue to lexical categories and combine them to build rudimentary representations of grammar.
功能词（如 the、he、that、on…）和内容词（如 house、blue、carry…）在语言学上的区别是普遍存在于世界上各种语言中的。这两个词汇类别在语音结构（功能词更短、更简单）和出现频率（单个功能词比大多数内容词更频繁）上也有所不同。基于频率的这两个类别的区分可能是婴儿习得语言基本构建块的强大机制。由于功能词构成封闭类，而内容词构成开放类，我们研究了 8 个月大的单语婴儿是否依赖词频来对功能词和内容词进行分类和跟踪。在六个人工语法学习实验中，我们发现婴儿将高频词归类为封闭类，将低频词归类为开放类，并根据其母语的基本语序来映射这些类别的相对顺序。这些发现提供了最早的证据，表明婴儿使用词频作为词汇类别线索，并将它们结合起来构建语法的基本表示。
