Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.
Infancy. 2020 Jul;25(4):458-477. doi: 10.1111/infa.12333. Epub 2020 Apr 15.
Infants amass thousands of hours of experience with particular items, each of which is representative of a broader category that often shares perceptual features. Robust word comprehension requires generalizing known labels to new category members. While young infants have been found to look at common nouns when they are named aloud, the role of item familiarity has not been well examined. This study compares 12- to 18-month-olds' word comprehension in the context of pairs of their own items (e.g., photographs of their own shoe and ball) versus new tokens from the same category (e.g., a new shoe and ball). Our results replicate previous work showing that noun comprehension improves rapidly over the second year, while also suggesting that item familiarity appears to play a far smaller role in comprehension in this age range. This in turn suggests that even before age 2, ready generalization beyond particular experiences is an intrinsic component of lexical development.
婴儿积累了数千小时的特定物品经验，每个物品都代表着一个更广泛的类别，这些类别通常具有相似的感知特征。强大的单词理解能力需要将已知的标签推广到新的类别成员。虽然已经发现，当婴儿听到自己的名字被大声念出时，他们会看着常见名词，但物品熟悉度的作用尚未得到很好的研究。本研究比较了 12 至 18 个月大的婴儿在自己的物品对（例如，他们自己的鞋子和球的照片）与来自同一类别的新代币（例如，新鞋子和球）的情况下的单词理解能力。我们的研究结果复制了之前的研究结果，表明名词理解能力在第二年迅速提高，同时也表明在这个年龄段，物品熟悉度在理解中似乎作用较小。这反过来表明，即使在 2 岁之前，超越特定经验的准备性推广也是词汇发展的内在组成部分。
