Baldwin D A, Markman E M, Bill B, Desjardins R N, Irwin J M, Tidball G
Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene 97403, USA.
Child Dev. 1996 Dec;67(6):3135-53.
The language children hear presents them with a multitude of co-occurrences between words and things in the world, and they must repeatedly determine which among these manifold co-occurrences is relevant. Social factors--such as cues regarding the speaker's referential intent--might serve as one guide to whether word-object covariation should be registered. In 2 studies, infants (15-20 months and 18-20 months in Studies 1 and 2, respectively) heard novel labels at a time when they were investigating a single novel object; in one case the label was uttered by a speaker seated within the infant's view and displaying concurrent attention to the novel toy (coupled condition), whereas in the other case the label emanated from a speaker seated out of the infant's view (decoupled condition). In both studies, subsequent comprehension questions indicated that infants of 18-20 months registered a stable link between label and object in the coupled conditions, but not in the decoupled condition, despite the fact that covariation between label and object was equivalent in the 2 conditions. Thus, by 18-20 months children are inclined to establish a mapping between word and object only when a speaker displays signs of referring to that object.
儿童听到的语言向他们呈现了单词与世间事物之间大量同时出现的情况，他们必须反复确定这些纷繁复杂的同时出现的情况中哪些是相关的。社会因素——比如关于说话者指称意图的线索——可能作为一个指引，来判断词与物的共变关系是否应该被记录下来。在两项研究中，婴儿（研究1和研究2中的婴儿分别为15至20个月和18至20个月）在正在研究一个新奇物体时听到了新奇的标签；一种情况是标签由坐在婴儿视线范围内且同时对新奇玩具表现出关注的说话者说出（关联条件），而另一种情况是标签由坐在婴儿视线范围外的说话者发出（非关联条件）。在两项研究中，随后的理解问题表明，18至20个月大的婴儿在关联条件下记录了标签与物体之间的稳定联系，但在非关联条件下则没有，尽管在这两种条件下标签与物体之间的共变关系是等同的。因此，到18至20个月大时，儿童仅在说话者表现出指向该物体的迹象时，才倾向于在单词和物体之间建立映射关系。
