Ferry Alissa L, Corcoran Mia G, Williams Emily, Curtis Sheila M, Gale Cathryn J, Twomey Katherine E
Division of Psychology, Communication, and Human Neuroscience, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
Child Dev. 2025 Mar-Apr;96(2):492-507. doi: 10.1111/cdev.14182. Epub 2024 Nov 1.
The ability to compare plays a key role in how humans learn, but words that describe relations between objects, like comparisons, are difficult to learn. We examined how children learn size comparison words, and how their interpretations of these change across development. One-hundred-and-forty children in England (36-107 months; 68 girls; majority White) were asked to build block structures that were bigger, longer, smaller, shorter, or taller than an experimenter's. Children were most successful with words that refer to size increases. Younger children were less accurate with smaller and shorter, often building bigger structures. The dimensional aspect of taller emerged gradually. These findings suggest that children's interpretation of the meaning of size comparison words changes and becomes more precise across development.
比较能力在人类学习方式中起着关键作用，但描述物体间关系的词汇，比如比较词，却很难掌握。我们研究了儿童如何学习大小比较词，以及他们对这些词的理解在成长过程中是如何变化的。我们让英国的140名儿童（年龄在36至107个月之间；68名女孩；大多数为白人）搭建比实验者搭建的更大、更长、更小、更短或更高的积木结构。儿童在表示尺寸增加的词汇上表现最为成功。年龄较小的儿童在表示更小和更短的词汇上准确性较低，常常搭建出更大的结构。“更高”的维度概念是逐渐形成的。这些发现表明，儿童对大小比较词含义的理解在成长过程中会发生变化，并且会变得更加精确。
