Tillman Katharine A, Wagner Katie, Barner David
Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego.
Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin.
Open Mind (Camb). 2024 Sep 15;8:1129-1152. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00163. eCollection 2024.
Children learn their first number words gradually over the course of many months, which is surprising given their ability to discriminate small numerosities. One potential explanation for this is that children are sensitive to the numerical features of stimuli, but don't consider exact cardinality as a primary hypothesis for novel word meanings. To test this, we trained 144 children on a number word they hadn't yet learned, and contrasted this with a condition in which they were merely required to attend to number to identify the word's referent, without encoding number as its meaning. In the first condition, children were trained to find a "giraffe with three spots." In the second condition, children were instead trained to find "Mr. Three", which also named a giraffe with three spots. In both conditions, children had to attend to number to identify the target giraffe, but, because proper nouns refer to individuals rather than their properties, the second condition did not require children to encode number as the meaning of the expression. We found that children were significantly better at identifying the giraffe when it had been labeled with the proper noun than with the number word. This finding contrasted with a second experiment involving color words, in which children ( = 56) were equally successful with a proper noun ("Mr. Purple") and an adjective ("the giraffe with purple spots"). Together, these findings suggest that, for number, but not for color, children's difficulty acquiring new words cannot be solely attributed to problems with attention or perception, but instead may be due to difficulty selecting the correct meaning from their hypothesis space for learning unknown words.
儿童在数月的时间里逐渐学会他们的第一批数字词汇，鉴于他们辨别少量数字的能力，这一现象令人惊讶。对此一种可能的解释是，儿童对刺激的数字特征敏感，但并不将精确的基数作为新单词意义的主要假设。为了验证这一点，我们对144名儿童进行了他们尚未学过的数字单词训练，并将其与另一种情况进行对比，即只要求他们关注数字以识别单词的指代对象，而不将数字编码为其意义。在第一种情况下，儿童被训练去找到“一只带有三个斑点的长颈鹿”。在第二种情况下，儿童则被训练去找到“三号先生”，它也指一只带有三个斑点的长颈鹿。在这两种情况下，儿童都必须关注数字以识别目标长颈鹿，但是，由于专有名词指代的是个体而非其属性，第二种情况并不要求儿童将数字编码为该表达的意义。我们发现，当长颈鹿被用专有名词标注时，儿童识别它的能力明显优于用数字单词标注的情况。这一发现与第二个涉及颜色单词的实验形成对比，在该实验中，儿童（ = 56）用专有名词（“紫色先生”）和形容词（“一只带有紫色斑点的长颈鹿”）时同样成功。总之，这些发现表明，对于数字而非颜色，儿童获取新单词的困难不能仅仅归因于注意力或感知方面的问题，而可能是由于难以从他们的假设空间中为学习未知单词选择正确的意义。
