Moore C, Harris L, Patriquin M
Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
J Child Lang. 1993 Feb;20(1):153-67. doi: 10.1017/s030500090000917x.
This study examined the development of children's comprehension of the use of intonation and belief verbs to mark the relative certainty with which a speaker makes a statement. Subjects were presented with a task in which they had to guess the location of an object hidden in one of two boxes over a series of trials. As clues to location, the children were presented with contrasting pairs of statements by two puppets. In the first experiment with 30 children at each of three, four, five and six years of age, statements in each pair differed either with respect to the belief term included - know, think or guess - or with respect to terminal pitch contour - rising or falling. Results showed that three-year-olds did not use any information reliably to determine the location of the object, four-year-olds treated falling pitch as a more reliable indicator of location than rising pitch, and older children responded on the basis of the belief terms but not on the basis of prosody. In Experiment 2, 40 children at each of three, four and five years heard statements which differed with respect to both belief verbs and prosody. In one condition falling intonation was paired with the more certain belief term in each pair, and rising intonation with the less certain pair. In a second condition, the pairings were reversed. Results showed that, while four-year-olds could tell the difference between know and think, they could not use intonation information to determine the location. Five-year-olds used both lexical and prosodic information, with prosodic cues modulating the effects of lexical. Taken together, these experiments show that prosodic and lexical cues start to be used by children to interpret relative speaker certainty at about the same time developmentally, but that lexical cues initially appear to dominate while prosodic ones modulate their effects. Finally, it is argued that children's understanding of prosody will be best revealed in contexts in which they are required to respond to the pragmatic function of verbal stimuli rather than to the lexical content.
本研究考察了儿童对语调及信念动词运用的理解发展情况，这些用于表明说话者陈述相对确定性的方式。研究让受试者完成一项任务，在一系列试验中，他们必须猜测藏在两个盒子之一中的物体位置。作为位置线索，儿童会听到两个木偶说出的对比性陈述对。在第一个实验中，研究选取了三岁、四岁、五岁和六岁的儿童各30名，每对陈述在包含的信念词（知道、认为或猜测）方面或者在结尾音高轮廓（升调或降调）方面有所不同。结果显示，三岁儿童不会可靠地利用任何信息来确定物体位置，四岁儿童将降调视为比升调更可靠的位置指示，而年龄较大的儿童根据信念词做出反应，而非基于韵律。在实验2中，三岁、四岁和五岁的儿童各40名，他们听到的陈述在信念动词和韵律方面均有差异。在一种情况下，降调与每对中更确定的信念词搭配，升调与较不确定的信念词搭配。在第二种情况下，搭配方式相反。结果显示，虽然四岁儿童能够区分“知道”和“认为”，但他们无法利用语调信息来确定位置。五岁儿童同时运用了词汇和韵律信息，韵律线索调节了词汇的影响。综合来看，这些实验表明，韵律和词汇线索在儿童发展过程中开始被用于解读说话者相对确定性的时间大致相同，但最初词汇线索似乎占主导，而韵律线索调节其效果。最后，有人认为，儿童对韵律的理解在他们需要对言语刺激的语用功能而非词汇内容做出反应的情境中会得到最好的体现。
