Forbes J N, Poulin-Dubois D
Centre for Research in Human Development, Concordia University, USA.
J Child Lang. 1997 Jun;24(2):389-406. doi: 10.1017/s0305000997003127.
The ability to generalize verbs to new examples of previously labelled events demonstrates an implicit understanding that verbs are representative symbols of categories of events. The present study examined when and how very young children generalize familiar verbs to novel events by using the preferential looking paradigm. Overall, 24 children aged 1;8 and 25 children aged 2;2 demonstrated their understanding of the verbs kick and pick-up by looking significantly longer at the target events on control trials. Additionally, children aged 1;8 with the largest expressive vocabulary generalized the same verbs to actions with different agents, but not to actions differing in outcome or manner of action. In contrast, children aged 2;2 consistently extended familiar action verbs to other actions differing in agent or manner, regardless of the size of their expressive vocabulary. These findings were not due to the saliency of any of the actions used and are interpreted in terms of representational change consistent with the acquisition of lexical learning principles.
将动词推广到先前标记事件的新例子的能力表明，儿童隐含地理解动词是事件类别的代表性符号。本研究通过使用优先注视范式，考察了幼儿在何时以及如何将熟悉的动词推广到新事件上。总体而言，24名1;8岁的儿童和25名2;2岁的儿童在对照试验中通过对目标事件注视时间显著更长，表明他们理解了“踢”和“捡起”这两个动词。此外，表达性词汇量最大的1;8岁儿童将相同的动词推广到了由不同施动者执行的动作上，但没有推广到结果或动作方式不同的动作上。相比之下，2;2岁的儿童一致地将熟悉的动作动词推广到施动者或动作方式不同的其他动作上，无论其表达性词汇量大小如何。这些发现并非由于所使用的任何动作的显著性，而是根据与词汇学习原则的获得相一致的表征变化来解释的。
