Leung Ashley, Yurovsky Daniel, Hawkins Robert D
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
Child Dev. 2025 Mar-Apr;96(2):546-561. doi: 10.1111/cdev.14186. Epub 2024 Nov 18.
Adults readily coordinate on temporary pacts about how to refer to things in conversation. Young children are also capable of forming pacts with peers given appropriate experimenter intervention. Here, we investigate whether parents may spontaneously provide a similar kind of scaffolding with U.S. children in a director-matcher task (N = 201, 49% female; ages 4, 6, 8). In Experiment 1, we show that parents initiate more clarification exchanges with younger children who, in turn, are more likely to adopt labels introduced by the parent. We then examine whether the benefit of such scaffolding acts primarily through childrens' difficulties with comprehension (Experiment 2) or production (Experiment 3). Our findings suggest that parents primarily scaffold pacts by easing children's production difficulties, modeling cooperative communication.
成年人在对话中很容易就如何指代事物达成临时协定。在实验者的适当干预下，幼儿也能够与同伴达成协定。在此，我们研究了在一个导演-匹配者任务中（N = 201，49%为女性；年龄为4岁、6岁、8岁），美国儿童的父母是否会自发地提供类似的支架。在实验1中，我们发现父母会与年龄较小的孩子发起更多的澄清交流，而这些孩子反过来更有可能采用父母引入的标签。然后，我们研究这种支架的益处主要是通过儿童在理解（实验2）还是表达（实验3）方面的困难起作用。我们的研究结果表明，父母主要通过减轻孩子的表达困难、示范合作性交流来搭建协定的支架。
