Waxman S R, Markow D B
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208-2710, USA.
Cogn Psychol. 1995 Dec;29(3):257-302. doi: 10.1006/cogp.1995.1016.
Recent research has documented specific linkages between language and conceptual organization in the developing child. However, most of the evidence for these linkages derives from children who have made significant linguistic and conceptual advances. We therefore focus on the emergence of one particular linkage--the noun-category linkage--in infants at the early stages of lexical acquisition. We propose that when infants embark upon the process of lexical acquisition, they are initially biased to interpret a word applied to an object as referring to that object and to other members of its kind. We further propose that this initial expectation will become increasingly specific over development, as infants begin to distinguish among the grammatical categories as they are marked in their native language and assign them more specific types of meaning. To test this hypothesis, we conducted three experiments using a modified novelty-preference paradigm to reveal whether and how novel words influence object categorization in 12- to 13-month old infants. The data reveal that a linkage between words and object categories emerges early enough to serve as a guide in infants' efforts to map words to meanings. Both nouns and adjectives focused infants' attention on object categories, particularly at the superordinate level. Further, infants' progress in early word learning was associated with their appreciation of this linkage between words and object categories. These results are interpreted within a developmental and cross-linguistic account of the emergence of linkages between linguistic and conceptual organization.
最近的研究记录了发育中的儿童语言与概念组织之间的特定联系。然而，这些联系的大多数证据都来自于在语言和概念方面取得显著进步的儿童。因此，我们关注词汇习得早期阶段婴儿中一种特定联系——名词类别联系——的出现。我们提出，当婴儿开始词汇习得过程时，他们最初倾向于将应用于某个物体的单词解释为指代该物体及其同类的其他成员。我们进一步提出，随着婴儿开始区分母语中标记的语法类别并赋予它们更具体的意义类型，这种最初的期望在发育过程中会变得越来越具体。为了验证这一假设，我们进行了三项实验，使用改良的新奇偏好范式来揭示新奇单词是否以及如何影响12至13个月大婴儿的物体分类。数据显示，单词与物体类别之间的联系出现得足够早，足以在婴儿将单词映射到意义的努力中起到指导作用。名词和形容词都将婴儿的注意力集中在物体类别上，尤其是在上级层面。此外，婴儿在早期单词学习中的进步与他们对单词和物体类别之间这种联系的理解有关。这些结果是在语言和概念组织之间联系出现的发展性和跨语言解释框架内进行解读的。
