Bloom P, Kelemen D
Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson 85721, USA.
Cognition. 1995 Jul;56(1):1-30. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(94)00648-5.
One basic finding in the study of word learning is that children tend to construe a word describing an object as referring to the kind of whole object, rather than to a part of the object, one of its properties, or the substance it is made of. This has been taken as evidence that there exist certain special constraints on word meaning that guide children to favor the kind-of-object interpretation when exposed to a new word. There are descriptive problems with this proposal, however, as it cannot explain how children learn other kinds of words, such as names for specific people, substances, parts, events, collections, and periods of time. These problems motivate an alternative theory in which young children possess several distinct conceptual categories--including "individual", which is more abstract than "whole object"--and can use syntactic cues to determine the conceptual category that a new word belongs to. This theory is explored in two experiments in which we attempt to use syntactic cues to teach children and adults novel collective nouns--words that refer to groups of objects. The results indicate that children can use such cues to learn names for kinds of individuals that are not whole objects, although they are less able to do so than adults. Candidate explanations for why this developmental difference exists are discussed and implications are drawn for theories of word learning and conceptual representation.
在词汇学习研究中的一个基本发现是，儿童倾向于将描述一个物体的词理解为指代整个物体的类别，而不是物体的一部分、它的一种属性或其构成物质。这一点被视为存在某些对词义的特殊限制的证据，这些限制引导儿童在接触新单词时倾向于对物体类别进行解释。然而，这个提议存在描述性问题，因为它无法解释儿童如何学习其他种类的单词，比如特定人物、物质、部分、事件、集合以及时间段的名称。这些问题促使人们提出一种替代理论，即幼儿拥有几个不同的概念类别——包括比“整个物体”更抽象的“个体”——并且可以利用句法线索来确定一个新单词所属的概念类别。我们在两个实验中探讨了这一理论，在实验中我们试图利用句法线索来教儿童和成年人新的集体名词——指代物体群体的单词。结果表明，儿童能够利用这些线索来学习非整个物体的个体类别的名称，尽管他们在这方面的能力不如成年人。我们讨论了这种发展差异存在的可能解释，并对词汇学习理论和概念表征理论得出了相关启示。
