Bates E, MacWhinney B, Caselli C, Devescovi A, Natale F, Venza V
Child Dev. 1984 Apr;55(2):341-54.
Studies of the development of sentence comprehension strategies in English have indicated that, at first, children tend to rely on pragmatic and semantic strategies, whereas, later on, they rely primarily on word order to determine the basic grammatical relations. However, before making strong conclusions regarding the role of semantics in comprehension, it is necessary to distinguish between (1) extragrammatical knowledge of world events and (2) abstract semantic distinctions that may be an integral part of the parsing process. An earlier study of American and Italian adults indicated that use of such abstract semantic strategies may be a core strategy for parsing in Italian. In the present study, we compared sentence interpretation in American and Italian children between the ages of 2 and 5. From the earliest stages, children showed sensitivity to the relative information value of the various cues in their native language; Italians relied primarily on semantic cues, whereas American children relied on word order. In general, the data did not support claims regarding the existence of universal hypotheses about language structure. There was also evidence that the failure of these young children to make full use of certain interpretive cues resulted from their inability to appreciate the discourse functions of these cues.
对英语句子理解策略发展的研究表明，起初，儿童倾向于依赖语用和语义策略，而后来，他们主要依靠词序来确定基本的语法关系。然而，在就语义在理解中的作用得出强有力的结论之前，有必要区分（1）关于世界事件的语法外知识和（2）可能是句法分析过程不可或缺一部分的抽象语义区分。一项对美国和意大利成年人的早期研究表明，使用此类抽象语义策略可能是意大利语句法分析的核心策略。在本研究中，我们比较了2至5岁美国儿童和意大利儿童对句子的理解。从最早阶段开始，儿童就对其母语中各种线索的相对信息价值表现出敏感性；意大利儿童主要依赖语义线索，而美国儿童则依赖词序。总体而言，数据不支持关于语言结构存在普遍假设的说法。也有证据表明，这些幼儿未能充分利用某些解释性线索是由于他们无法理解这些线索的语篇功能。
