Heibeck T H, Markman E M
Child Dev. 1987 Aug;58(4):1021-34.
Children may be able to gain at least partial information about the meaning of a word from how it is used in a sentence, what words it is contrasted with, as well as other factors. This strategy, known as fast mapping, may allow the child to quickly hypothesize about the meaning of a word. It is not yet known whether this strategy is available to children in semantic domains other than color. In the first study, 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds were introduced to a novel color, shape, or texture word by contrasting the new term with a well-known word from that domain. They were then tested for their ability to produce and comprehend the new term and for whether they knew what semantic domain the word referred to. The results show that even 2-year-old children can quickly narrow down the meaning of a word in each of the semantic domains examined, although children learned more about shape terms than color or texture words. A second study explored the effects of several variables on children's ability to infer the meaning of a new term. One finding of this study was that if the context is compelling, children can figure out the meaning of a new word even without hearing an explicit linguistic contrast.
儿童也许能够从一个词在句子中的用法、与它形成对比的词以及其他因素中，至少获取关于该词含义的部分信息。这种被称为快速映射的策略，可能使儿童能够迅速对一个词的含义进行推测。目前尚不清楚这种策略是否适用于除颜色之外的其他语义领域的儿童。在第一项研究中，通过将新术语与该领域中一个广为人知的词进行对比，向2岁、3岁和4岁的儿童介绍了一个新的颜色、形状或质地的词。然后测试他们生成和理解这个新术语的能力，以及他们是否知道这个词所指的语义领域。结果表明，即使是2岁的儿童也能在每个所考察的语义领域中迅速缩小一个词的含义范围，尽管儿童对形状术语的学习比颜色或质地词更多。第二项研究探讨了几个变量对儿童推断新术语含义能力的影响。这项研究的一个发现是，如果语境具有说服力，儿童即使没有听到明确的语言对比，也能弄清新词的含义。
