共查询到20条相似文献，搜索用时 31 毫秒
1.
Generic noun phrases (e.g., "Bats live in caves") are important for expressing knowledge about abstract kinds. Past work has found that parents frequently use generic noun phrases in their speech to young children. However, little is known regarding how children understand these expressions, nor which cues signal generic meaning. The present set of 5 studies examined the influence of linguistic form class (e.g., "What color are dogs?" [generic] versus "What color are the dogs?" [nongeneric]) and of pragmatic context (e.g., "What color are they?" in the presence of either a single exemplar [generic] or multiple exemplars [nongeneric]). Participants were 2-year-olds (N = 42), 3-year-olds (N = 40), 4-year-olds (N = 40), and adults (N = 51). The data indicate that by 2 years of age, children use linguistic form class, and by 3 years of age, children use pragmatic context. These findings demonstrate that young children have begun to understand the distinction between generic and nongeneric noun phrases from a very young age, and that identification of generics is signaled not by formal or pragmatic cues alone, but by a combination of information from both language form and pragmatic context. It is suggested that children make use of multiple linguistic and conceptual cues to acquire and interpret generics. 相似文献
2.
These studies investigated two hundred and forty-four 24- and 30-month-olds' sensitivity to generic versus nongeneric language when acquiring knowledge about novel kinds. Toddlers were administered an inductive inference task, during which they heard a generic noun phrase (e.g., "Blicks drink milk") or a nongeneric noun phrase (e.g., "This blick drinks milk") paired with an action (e.g., drinking) modeled on an object. They were then provided with the model and a nonmodel exemplar and asked to imitate the action. After hearing nongeneric phrases, 30-month-olds, but not 24-month-olds, imitated more often with the model than with the nonmodel exemplar. In contrast, after hearing generic phrases, 30-month-olds imitated equally often with both exemplars. These results suggest that 30-month-olds use the generic/nongeneric distinction to guide their inferences about novel kinds. 相似文献
3.
These studies investigate how the distinction between generic sentences (e.g., "Boys are good at math") and nongeneric sentences (e.g., "Johnny is good at math") shapes children's social cognition. These sentence types are hypothesized to have different implications about the source and nature of the properties conveyed. Specifically, generics may be more likely to imply that the referred-to properties emerge naturally from an internal source, which may cause these properties to become essentialized. Four experiments (N = 269 four-year-olds and undergraduates) confirmed this hypothesis but also suggested that participants only essentialize the information provided in generic form when this construal is consistent with their prior theoretical knowledge. These studies further current understanding of language as a means of learning about others. 相似文献
4.
D. Geoffrey Hall 《Child development》1994,65(5):1299-1317
4 experiments examined 3- and 4-year-olds' interpretations of novel words applied to familiar objects in the sentence frame, "This Y is X," where X is a novel word, and Y is a familiar basic-level count noun (e.g., "dog", "cup"). These novel words are ambiguous and could be interpreted either as proper names (e.g., "Fred") or as adjectives/mass nouns (e.g., "red"/"lead"). The experiments addressed 2 questions. First, do children appreciate that the words can be construed either as proper names referring to individuals or as adjectives/mass nouns referring to salient properties/material kinds? The results showed that children could easily make either interpretation. Second, what factors affect children's tendency to make either a proper name or an adjective/mass noun interpretation? In the experiments, children learned the novel words for a range of animals and artifacts. Most children who learned the words for typical pets (e.g., a bird) made proper name interpretations, as did the majority of those who learned the words for certain non-pet animals (e.g., a caterpillar) described as possessed by someone, but only about half of those who learned the words for such non-pet animals not so described. Very few children who learned the words for either simple (e.g., a shoe) or complex (e.g., a boat) artifacts made proper name interpretations. The results provide clear evidence of the role of semantic information in constraining children's interpretation of a novel word, and they help to refine an understanding of what counts as a nameable individual for preschoolers. 相似文献
5.
In 2 experiments, 3 1/2-year-old children interpreted a novel count noun (e.g., "This is a murvil") applied to an unfamiliar stuffed animal as referring to a basic-level kind, rather than to a kind that individuates its members by type of situation (context or life-phase). For example, children made interpretations akin to PERSON (a basic-level kind) rather than PASSENGER (a context-restricted kind), and DOG (a basic-level kind) rather than PUPPY (a life-phase-restricted kind). These experiments also document the role of object familiarity (previous knowledge of a basic-level count noun for the animal) and explicit information (about the relevance of the animal's situation) in the learning of count nouns for situation-restricted kinds. We note that children readily learn the meanings of basic-level count nouns through ostensive definitions (e.g., "This is an X"), although ostensive definitions do not distinguish basic-level kinds from situation-restricted kinds. Therefore, we suggest that children make an implicit assumption that a count noun applied to an unfamiliar solid object refers to a basic-level kind of object, and not to a kind that individuates its members by type of situation. We illustrate the importance of this assumption by showing how it bears directly on individuation, and therefore, on quantification (e.g., counting). 相似文献
6.
Acquiring Proper Nouns for Familiar and Unfamiliar Animate Objects: Two-Year-Olds' Word-learning Biases 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
D. Geoffrey Hall 《Child development》1991,62(5):1142-1154
In 2 studies, 2-year-old children learned a novel word modeled as a proper noun (e.g., "This is Zav") for an animate stuffed toy. Children who learned the word for a familiar object (i.e., one for which they knew a basic-level count noun for the kind) interpreted the word appropriately as a proper noun reliably more often than children who learned the word for an unfamiliar object (i.e., one for which they did not know such a count noun). When the creature was familiar, children typically interpreted the novel word as if it were a proper noun referring uniquely to the labeled individual. When the animal was unfamiliar, children frequently interpreted the word as if it were a count noun referring to a kind of object. Children's spontaneous comments during the tasks provided striking additional evidence that their interpretations of the proper noun varied with the familiarity of the object. The results suggest that young children's sensitivity to the form class of proper nouns is affected by the familiarity of the referent object. The findings are discussed in terms of interpretative biases in word learning. 相似文献
7.
We examined the role of object kind familiarity (i.e., knowledge of a count noun for an object) on preschoolers' sensitivity to the relation between a novel word's form class (adjective or count noun) and its reference (to a material kind-property or to an object kind). We used a forced-choice match-to-target task, in which children learned a word for one object (e.g., a metal cup), and then chose between 2 other objects. One was from the same object kind but a different material kind (with different related properties, such as color and texture; e.g., a white plastic cup); the other was from a different object kind but the same material kind (with the same related properties; e.g., a metal spoon). In Experiment 1, children learned either a count noun (e.g., "This is a zav") or an adjective (e.g., "This is a zav one"). Within each form class, we crossed the familiarity of the referent object kind (familiar and unfamiliar) with the age of the children (2- and 4-year-olds). The principal finding was that in interpreting an adjective, 4-year-olds were more likely to choose the object sharing material kind with the target if the target was familiar than if it was unfamiliar. No such familiarity effect was evident among 2-year-olds. In Experiment 2, we employed a more unambiguously adjectival frame (e.g., "This is a very zav-ish one"), and replicated the results of Experiment 1. We interpret the results in terms of 2 proposed word learning biases: one that learners initially expect any word applied to an unfamiliar object to refer to a (basic-level) kind of object, and a second that learners prefer words to contrast in meaning. We consider several interpretations of the observed age difference. 相似文献
8.
Thomas C. Lorsbach Sherry Wilson Jason F. Reimer 《Contemporary educational psychology》1996,21(4):447-466
The present study examined whether language/learning disabled children have greater difficulty than nondisabled children suppressing information that becomes irrelevant during a sentence processing and memory task. During study trials, children were asked to predict and remember the terminal nouns for a series of sentences that highly constrained a terminal noun. For half of the study trials (fillers) the child's prediction was confirmed by presenting the child with the expected ending (e.g., “Butterflies fly by flapping their . . .wings.”). For the remaining study trials (critical trials), however, the sentence ending expected by the child was disconfirmed with a low-probability ending (target noun). Thus, when presented with the sentence, “We made a sandwich with peanut butter and . . . ,” the child's prediction (“jelly”) was disconfirmed with a different ending (“bananas”). Memory for the disconfirmed and target nouns of critical study trials were subsequently tested implicitly with a new sentence-completion task. In this case, memory for disconfirmed and target nouns that had been associated with individual study sentences were measured in terms of priming effects. The analysis of priming effects indicated that language/learning disabled children experienced greater difficulty than nondisabled children inhibiting the activation of irrelevant information (disconfirmed nouns) and sustaining the activation of relevant information (target nouns) during a verbal memory task. These results were discussed in terms of their implications for some of the memory and language difficulties of language/learning disabled children. 相似文献
9.
1 hypothesis about children's developing conception of the mind is that preschoolers are limited to an understanding that persons have internal, mental contents like thoughts and beliefs, whereas older children and adults conceive of the mind itself as an independent, active structure or processor. Adults' conception of the mind in this independent active fashion seems evident in their use of personified mental metaphor (e.g., "My mind tricked me"). 3 studies examined the development and consolidation of this active, personified view. Study 1 provided an analysis of natural language data regarding 1 child's uses of vision words such as see and look from age 2 1/2 to 8 years. We examined the child's use of such words to refer literally to perception (e.g., "I see the TV") and also to refer nonliterally to active mental processes such as comprehension and inference (e.g., "I see what you mean"). Studies 2 and 3 examined 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds' comprehension and production of mental metaphors. In a metaphor comprehension task, we asked children to interpret personified metaphoric statements about the mind (e.g., "My mind wandered") and 3 comparison domains, mechanics (e.g., "The car is dead"), nature (e.g., "The wind is howling"), and emotion (e.g., "Her heart was smiling"). In an explanation task, we asked children to explain the processes underlying the making of both instant photos and mental images. The findings reveal a developing ability to interpret and produce statements personifying the mind and provide considerable evidence about children's movement toward a conception of the mind as an independent entity deserving reference and conceptualization in its own right. 相似文献
10.
Previous research has demonstrated that preschoolers can use situation-specific (e.g., visual access) and person-specific (e.g., prior accuracy) cues to infer what others know. The present studies investigated whether 4- and 5-year-olds appreciate the differential informativeness of these types of cues. In Experiment 1 (N = 50), children used others' prior labeling accuracy as a cue when learning labels for, but not the visual identity of, hidden objects. In Experiment 2 (N = 64), with both cues present, children attended more to visual access than prior accuracy when learning the visual identity of, but not labels for, hidden objects. These findings demonstrate that children appreciate the difference between situation- and person-specific cues and flexibly evaluate these cues depending on what information they are seeking. 相似文献
11.
Daniela Traficante Marco Marelli Claudio Luzzatti Cristina Burani 《Reading and writing》2014,27(7):1303-1326
Several studies on children and adults with and without linguistic impairment have reported differences between verb and noun processing. The present study assessed whether noun and verb bases affect differently children’s reading of derived words. Thirty-six Italian good readers and 18 poor readers, all 4th or 5th graders, were asked to read aloud nouns derived from either a noun base (e.g., artista, artist) or a verb base (e.g., punizione, punishment). Word and base frequency affected latencies only for deverbal nouns, while an effect of word length emerged for denominal nouns and an inhibitory effect of suffix length was found for both types of stimuli. A high base frequency and a high whole-word frequency both led to higher levels of accuracy. Verb bases led to higher error rates than noun bases. Poor readers, although slower and less accurate than good readers, showed a pattern of results similar to that of typically developing readers. Data confirm that in 4th and 5th graders morphological decomposition may affect reading aloud of long complex words, and that the grammatical class of the base can modulate this effect. 相似文献
12.
Human children and domesticated dogs learn from communicative cues, such as pointing, in highly similar ways. In two experiments, we investigate whether dogs are biased to defer to these cues in the same way as human children. We tested dogs on a cueing task similar to one previously conducted in human children. Dogs received conflicting information about the location of a treat from a Guesser and a Knower, who either used communicative cues (i.e., pointing; Experiments 1 and 2), non-communicative physical cues (i.e., a wooden marker; Experiment 1), or goal-directed actions (i.e., grasping; Experiment 2). Although human children tested previously struggled to override inaccurate information provided by the Guesser when she used communicative cues, in contrast to physical cues or goal-directed actions, dogs were more likely to override the Guesser’s information when she used communicative cues or goal-directed actions than when she used non-communicative physical cues. Given that dogs did not show the same selective bias towards the Guesser’s information in communicative contexts, these findings provide clear evidence that dogs do not demonstrate a human-like bias to defer to communicative cues. Instead, dogs may be more likely to critically evaluate information presented via communicative cues than either physical or non-communicative cues. 相似文献
13.
German children's comprehension of word order and case marking in causative sentences 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Two comprehension experiments were conducted to investigate whether German children are able to use the grammatical cues of word order and word endings (case markers) to identify agents and patients in a causative sentence and whether they weigh these two cues differently across development. Two-year-olds correctly understood only sentences with both cues supporting each other—the prototypical form. Five-year-olds were able to use word order by itself but not case markers. Only 7-year-olds behaved like adults by relying on case markers over word order when the two cues conflicted. These findings suggest that prototypical instances of linguistic constructions with redundant grammatical marking play a special role in early acquisition, and only later do children isolate and weigh individual grammatical cues appropriately. 相似文献
14.
Inferring False Beliefs from Actions and Reactions 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Current evidence suggests that young children have little understanding of false belief. Standard false belief tasks, however, may underestimate children's ability for 2 reasons. First, the only cue to belief in these tasks is a protagonist's lack of perceptual access to some critical event, and this may not be a very salient cue for young children. Second, the standard tasks require children to make forward-looking predictions from the causes of a belief (e.g., from what a protagonist has or has not perceived) to either the protagonist's belief or the protagonist's action, and children may not be very skilled at making such predictions. In 2 experiments we investigated whether 3-year-olds would do better on tasks in which the belief cues were stronger, and in which they could reason backward to the belief from its effects (e.g., from a protagonist's actions and reactions). Even on these easy tasks, however, they did not perform well. These findings provide strong support for the view that children of this age do not fully understand the representational nature of belief. 相似文献
15.
Scott A. Crossley Dani Francuz Rose Cassondra Danekes Charles Wesley Rose Danielle S. McNamara 《Reading and writing》2017,30(3):569-589
This paper examines the effects of attended and unattended demonstratives on text processing, comprehension, and writing quality in two studies. In the first study, participants (n = 45) read 64 mini-stories in a self-paced reading task and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives (i.e., this, that, these, and those) contained in the sentences and whether the referent was followed by a demonstrative determiner and noun (i.e., an attended demonstrative) or a demonstrative pronoun (i.e., an unattended demonstrative). In the second study, 173 persuasive essays written by high school students were rated by expert judges on overall writing quality using a standardized rubric. Expert coders manually counted the number and types of demonstratives (attended and unattended demonstratives) in each essay. These counts were used to predict the human scores of essay quality. The findings demonstrate that the use of unattended demonstratives as anaphoric references is disadvantageous to both reading time and referent identification. However, these disadvantages become advantages in terms of essay quality likely because linguistic complexity is a strong indicator of high proficiency writing. From a text processing and comprehension viewpoint, the findings indicate, then, that anaphoric reference is not always beneficial and does not always create a more cohesive text. In contrast, from a writing context, the use of unattended demonstratives leads to a more linguistically complex text, which generally equates to a higher quality text. 相似文献
16.
Subjects of verbs in English sentences may be indicated by any one of a number of cues. In some cases, the subject of the verb is determined by semantic constraints, as when the verb requires an animate noun phrase as subject; in other cases the subject is determined by syntactic factors, as in the case of third person singular verb markers; and, as is commonly the case in informal language, the most immediately preceding noun phrase is the subject of the verb. These three types of cues, semantic (here described as extensional), syntactic (here labeled intensional), and adjacency are investigated in a series of tests of sentence comprehension using university undergraduates as subjects.The results of these experiments show that when the adjacency strategy does not apply, even these highly literate native speakers have great difficulty in correctly comprehending subject-verb correspondences.These results are discussed in the context of the relationship between intensional linguistic processing and literacy. 相似文献
17.
In 4 experiments, we examined how young children incorporate new word meanings into their lexicons. 2-year-olds were each taught a new noun for an object that already had a known label (e.g., a "fep" for a dog). Children's interpretations of the new nouns were assessed by asking subjects to select the named toy from an array of 4 toys (e.g., "Point to a fep"). The experiments were designed to determine which of several possible semantic relations between novel and familiar words was most consistent with children's performance. It was found that children often seemed to interpret the new word as referring to a subordinate of the known category. This tendency was reduced when the named object could sensibly receive a proper name (e.g., when the named object was a stuffed animal), particularly when children had to consider both the familiar and the novel label for the object in the same session. Although not all alternative explanations have been ruled out, these results suggest that, from a very young age, children may spontaneously form language hierarchies when they hear a novel work for an object that already has a familiar name. 相似文献
18.
《The Journal of educational research》2012,105(2):71-74
AbstractProcess of acquisition of grammar was studied with 320 children randomly selected from 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders in three schools representing different socioeconomic backgrounds. Ss were individually presented 6 nonsense sentences and asked to guess the meaning of a stimulus word planted in each sentence. Two types of cues, grammatical "signal" and "signal plus syntactic position," were provided to suggest three parts-of-speech (noun, verb, and modifier). Responses were classified either as homogeneous (proper grammatical identification) or heterogeneous.No difference was found in frequency of homogeneous responses with regard to children's socio-economic background. Significant differences were associated with increase in cue information and with increase in age. 相似文献
19.
周永惠 《内江师范学院学报》2001,16(3):24-26
名词性词语能否作补语，一般语法教材不涉及，本认为名词性词语能作补语，并且不是个别现象，但含名词性补语的句子有一定的条件限制，在这类句中，补语一般是表示情况或处所等意义的，能带名词性补语的一般是动词。 相似文献
20.
Parafoveal word processing was examined during Korean reading. Twenty-four native speakers of Korean read sentences in two
conditions while their eye movements were being monitored. The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to create a mismatch between characters displayed before and after an eye movement contingent display change. In
the first condition, the critical previews were correct case markers in terms of syntactic category (e.g., object marker for
an object noun) but with a phonologically incorrect form (e.g., using 를 instead of 을 when the preceding noun ends with a consonant).
In the second condition, incorrect case markers in terms of syntactic category were used, creating a semantic mismatch between
preview and target. Results include a small but significant parafovea-on-fovea effect on the preceding fixation, combined
with a large effect on late measures of target word reading when a syntactically incorrect preview was presented. These results
indicate that skilled Korean readers are quite sensitive to high-level linguistic information available in the parafovea. 相似文献