Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2020 Nov;199:104914. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104914. Epub 2020 Jul 22.
Organized semantic representations encoding across- and within-domain distinctions are a hallmark of mature cognition, and understanding how they change with experience and learning is a key endeavor in developmental science. Existing computational modeling studies provide a mechanistic framework for understanding how structured semantic representations emerge as a result of development and learning. However, their predictions remain largely untested in young children, with the existing evidence providing only indirect tests of these predictions. Across two experiments, we provide the first direct examination of a key prediction derived from these computational models-that early in development, broad across-domain distinctions should generally be more strongly represented relative to finer-grained within-domain distinctions. The results support this hypothesis, being consistent with the exploitation of patterns of covariation among entities as a mechanism supporting the acquisition of structured semantic representations.
跨领域和领域内区别的有组织语义表示编码是成熟认知的标志，理解它们如何随着经验和学习而变化是发展科学的关键努力。现有的计算建模研究为理解结构化语义表示如何作为发展和学习的结果而出现提供了一个机械框架。然而，它们的预测在幼儿中仍然在很大程度上未经检验，现有的证据只是对这些预测的间接检验。在两项实验中，我们首次直接检验了这些计算模型得出的一个关键预测，即在发展早期，相对于更精细的领域内区别，广泛的跨领域区别通常应该得到更强烈的表示。结果支持这一假设，与利用实体之间的共变模式作为支持结构化语义表示获取的机制是一致的。
