Bowerman M
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1994 Oct 29;346(1315):37-45. doi: 10.1098/rstb.1994.0126.
Attempts to explain children's grammatical development often assume a close initial match between units of meaning and units of form; for example, agents are said to map to sentence-subjects and actions to verbs. The meanings themselves, according to this view, are not influenced by language, but reflect children's universal non-linguistic way of understanding the world. This paper argues that, contrary to this position, meaning as it is expressed in children's early sentences is, from the beginning, organized on the basis of experience with the grammar and lexicon of a particular language. As a case in point, children learning English and Korean are shown to express meanings having to do with direct motion according to language-specific principles of semantic and grammatical structuring from the earliest stages of word combination.
解释儿童语法发展的尝试通常假定意义单位和形式单位在最初有紧密的匹配；例如，施事者被认为对应于句子主语，动作对应于动词。根据这种观点，意义本身不受语言影响，而是反映儿童理解世界的普遍非语言方式。本文认为，与这种观点相反，儿童早期句子中所表达的意义从一开始就是基于对特定语言的语法和词汇的经验而组织起来的。作为一个例子，学习英语和韩语的儿童从单词组合的最早阶段就根据特定语言的语义和语法结构原则来表达与直接运动相关的意义。
