Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, 1401 Marie Mount Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, 1401 Marie Mount Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Cognition. 2021 Aug;213:104676. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104676. Epub 2021 Apr 1.
Jacques Mehler's earliest work concerned the independence of syntactic and semantic representations in adult sentence understanding, probing for independent contributions of sentence structure and sentence meaning in the psychological processes that underlie linguistic perception (e.g., Mehler, 1963; Mehler & Miller, 1964). The bulk of his career was spent pioneering the study of infants' linguistic cognition. In this paper, we bring these two streams together, using data from a suite of infant looking tasks to probe the syntactic representations that underlie sentence understanding for 30-month-olds. Each participant completed a battery of 3 tasks: one measuring knowledge of Principle C, one measuring lexical access speed and one measuring syntactic processing. We find that variability in performance on a Principle C task is predicted by variability in vocabulary, but not by either lexical access speed or a new measure of syntactic integration. Successful deployment of Principle C in 30-month-olds may therefore depend on factors related to vocabulary, but distinct from either lexical access or structure building. Identification of such factors remains an important goal for future work.
雅克·梅勒最早的研究工作涉及成人句子理解中句法和语义表示的独立性，探究句子结构和句子意义在语言感知的心理过程中（例如，梅勒，1963 年；梅勒和米勒，1964 年）的独立贡献。他的大部分职业生涯都在开拓婴儿语言认知的研究。在本文中，我们将这两个研究方向结合起来，使用了一系列婴儿观察任务的数据，来探究 30 个月大的婴儿的句子理解所基于的句法表示。每个参与者都完成了一系列 3 项任务：一项是测量对原则 C 的了解，一项是测量词汇获取速度，另一项是测量句法处理。我们发现，原则 C 任务的表现变化可以由词汇的变化来预测，但不能由词汇获取速度或新的句法整合措施来预测。因此，30 个月大的婴儿成功运用原则 C 可能取决于与词汇相关的因素，但与词汇获取或结构构建不同。确定这些因素仍然是未来工作的一个重要目标。
