Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto St. George, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.
PLoS One. 2022 Apr 28;17(4):e0267297. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0267297. eCollection 2022.
Using real-time eye-movement measures, we asked how a fantastical discourse context competes with stored representations of real-world events to influence the moment-by-moment interpretation of a story by 7-year-old children and adults. Seven-year-olds were less effective at bypassing stored real-world knowledge during real-time interpretation than adults. Our results suggest that children privilege stored semantic knowledge over situation-specific information presented in a fictional story context. We suggest that 7-year-olds' canonical semantic and conceptual relations are sufficiently strongly rooted in statistical patterns in language that have consolidated over time that they overwhelm new and unexpected information even when the latter is fantastical and highly salient.
我们利用实时眼动测量技术，研究了奇幻的语境如何与真实世界事件的存储表征竞争，从而影响 7 岁儿童和成年人对故事的即时解读。与成年人相比，7 岁儿童在实时解读过程中更难绕过存储的现实世界知识。我们的研究结果表明，儿童更倾向于利用存储的语义知识，而不是虚构故事语境中呈现的特定于情境的信息。我们认为，7 岁儿童的规范语义和概念关系在语言中经过时间巩固的统计模式中根深蒂固，以至于即使是新奇且高度显著的信息也会被其淹没，即使后者是奇幻的。
