Department of Comparative Language Science, University of Zurich.
Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zurich.
Cogn Sci. 2024 Sep;48(9):e13495. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13495.
Causation is a core feature of human cognition and language. How children learn about intricate causal meanings is yet unresolved. Here, we focus on how children learn verbs that express causation. Such verbs, known as lexical causatives (e.g., break and raise), lack explicit morphosyntactic markers indicating causation, thus requiring that the child generalizes the causal meaning from the context. The language addressed to children presumably plays a crucial role in this learning process. Hence, we tested whether adults adapt their use of lexical causatives to children when talking to them in day-to-day interactions. We analyzed naturalistic longitudinal data from 12 children in the Manchester corpus (spanning from 20 to 36 months of age). To detect semantic generalization, we employed a network approach with semantics learned from cross-situational contexts. Our results show an increasing trend in the expansion of causative semantics, observable in both child speech and child-directed speech. Adults consistently maintain somewhat more intricate causative semantic networks compared to children. However, both groups display evolving patterns. Around 28-30 months of age, children undergo a reduction in the degree of causative generalization, followed by a slightly time-lagged adjustment by adults in their speech directed to children. These findings substantiate adults' adaptation in child-directed speech, extending to semantics. They highlight child-directed speech as a highly adaptive and subconscious teaching tool that facilitates the dynamic processes of language acquisition.
因果关系是人类认知和语言的核心特征。儿童如何学习复杂的因果意义尚未得到解决。在这里，我们专注于儿童如何学习表达因果关系的动词。这些动词，称为词汇性使役动词（例如，break 和 raise），缺乏表示因果关系的明确形态句法标记，因此需要儿童从上下文中推断出因果意义。针对儿童的语言在这个学习过程中想必起着至关重要的作用。因此，我们测试了成年人在与儿童进行日常互动时，是否会根据与儿童交谈的情况调整他们使用词汇性使役动词的方式。我们分析了曼彻斯特语料库中 12 名儿童（年龄从 20 到 36 个月）的自然主义纵向数据。为了检测语义泛化，我们采用了一种基于跨情境语境学习语义的网络方法。我们的研究结果表明，在儿童语言和儿童导向语言中都可以观察到因果语义扩展的趋势。与儿童相比，成年人的使役语义网络始终保持着更加复杂的趋势。然而，两个群体都表现出不断演变的模式。在 28-30 个月左右，儿童的因果概括程度降低，随后成人在对儿童的语言指导中也会略微滞后地进行调整。这些发现证实了成年人在儿童导向语言中的适应，这种适应扩展到了语义。它们强调了儿童导向语言作为一种高度适应和潜意识的教学工具，促进了语言习得的动态过程。
