School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, UK.
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, UK.
Cognition. 2021 Jun;211:104612. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104612. Epub 2021 Feb 9.
Although words are often described as the basic building blocks of language, there is growing evidence that multiword sequences also play an integral role in language learning and processing. It is not known, however, whether children become sensitive to multiword information at an age when they are still building knowledge of individual words. Using a central fixation paradigm, the present study examined whether infants between 11 and 12 months (N = 36) distinguish between three-word sequences (trigrams) with similar substring frequencies but different multiword frequency in infant-directed speech (e.g., high frequency: 'clap your hands' vs. low frequency: 'take your hands'). Infants looked significantly longer at frequent trigrams compared to infrequent ones. This provides the first evidence that infants at the cusp of one-word production are already sensitive to the frequency of multiword sequences, and suggests they represent linguistic units of varying sizes from early on, raising the need to evaluate knowledge of both words and larger sequences during development.
虽然人们常说单词是语言的基本组成部分，但越来越多的证据表明，多词序列在语言学习和处理中也起着不可或缺的作用。然而，目前尚不清楚儿童在构建单词知识的同时，是否会对多词信息变得敏感。本研究采用中央注视范式，考察了 11 至 12 个月大的婴儿（N=36）是否能区分在婴儿导向语中具有相似子串频率但多词频率不同的三词序列（三字母词）（例如，高频：“clap your hands”与低频：“take your hands”）。与低频三字母词相比，婴儿明显会注视高频三字母词更长时间。这首次提供了证据表明，即将开始说单个单词的婴儿已经对多词序列的频率敏感，这表明他们很早就开始代表不同大小的语言单位，这就需要在发展过程中评估对单词和更大序列的了解。
