University of Washington.
University of California, Berkeley.
Child Dev. 2021 May;92(3):e329-e342. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13477. Epub 2020 Dec 23.
Why are spatial metaphors, like the use of "high" to describe a musical pitch, so common? This study tested one hundred and fifty-four 3- to 5-year-old English-learning children on their ability to learn a novel adjective in the domain of space or pitch and to extend this adjective to the untrained dimension. Children were more proficient at learning the word when it described a spatial attribute compared to pitch. However, once children learned the word, they extended it to the untrained dimension without feedback. Thus, children leveraged preexisting associations between space and pitch to spontaneously understand new metaphors. These results suggest that spatial metaphors may be common across languages in part because they scaffold children's acquisition of word meanings that are otherwise difficult to learn.
为什么空间隐喻，比如用“高”来描述音高，如此常见？本研究测试了 154 名 3 到 5 岁的英语学习者，让他们学习一个新的形容词，这个形容词是关于空间或音高的，然后将这个形容词扩展到未训练的维度。与描述音高相比，当形容词描述空间属性时，儿童更擅长学习这个词。然而，一旦儿童学习了这个词，他们就会在没有反馈的情况下将其扩展到未训练的维度。因此，儿童利用空间和音高之间已有的关联，自发地理解新的隐喻。这些结果表明，空间隐喻可能在不同语言中都很常见，部分原因是它们为儿童学习那些原本难以学习的词义提供了支撑。
