Merriman W E, Stevenson C M
Department of Psychology, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242, USA.
Child Dev. 1997 Apr;68(2):211-28.
Children under 2 1/2 years old tend to interpret novel words in accordance with the Mutual Exclusivity Principle, but tend not to reinterpret familiar words this way. Because alternative principles have been proposed that only predict the novel word effects, and because tests of the familiar word effects may have been flawed, a new test was administered. In Experiment 1 (N = 32), 24- to 25-month-olds heard stories in which a novel noun was used for an atypical exemplar of a familiar noun. When asked to select exemplars of the familiar noun, they showed a small but reliable tendency to avoid the object from the story. In Experiment 2 (N = 16), the novel nouns in the stories were replaced by pronouns and proper names, and the children did not avoid the story object in the test of the familiar noun. Thus, the aversion to this object that was observed in Experiment 1 was not due to its greater exposure or its being referenced immediately before testing, but to toddlers' Mutual Exclusivity bias. Their bias is hypothesized to be a form of implicit probabilistic knowledge that derives from the competitive nature of category retrieval.
2岁半以下的儿童倾向于根据互斥原则来解释新单词，但往往不会以这种方式重新解释熟悉的单词。由于已经提出了仅预测新单词效应的其他原则，并且由于熟悉单词效应的测试可能存在缺陷，因此进行了一项新的测试。在实验1（N = 32）中，24至25个月大的儿童听了一些故事，其中一个新名词用于指代一个熟悉名词的非典型示例。当被要求选择熟悉名词的示例时，他们表现出一种虽小但可靠的倾向，即避开故事中的那个物体。在实验2（N = 16）中，故事中的新名词被代词和专有名词取代，并且在熟悉名词测试中儿童没有避开故事中的物体。因此，在实验1中观察到的对该物体的厌恶并非由于其更多的曝光或在测试前立即被提及，而是由于幼儿的互斥偏差。他们的偏差被假设为一种源于类别检索竞争性质的隐性概率知识形式。
