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1.
According to Markman and Wachtel, children assume that nouns pick out mutually exclusive object categories, and so each object should have only one category label. While this assumption can be useful in word learning, it is not entirely reliable. Therefore, children need to learn when to and when not to make this assumption. 6 studies examined whether knowledge about hierarchical organization of categories and about cross-language equivalents for object labels can help children limit their use of this assumption appropriately. These studies revealed that adults as well as children resisted assigning 2 novel names to the same object in some situations. By age 4, children also seemed to know enough about categorization to accept 2 names for an object if the names picked out categories from different levels of a hierarchy (e.g., animal and lemur) but not if they picked out categories from the same level (e.g., lemur and seal). Moreover, monolingual as well as bilingual children seemed to know enough about languages to accept 2 names for the same object if the names clearly came from different languages. Together, these findings suggest that even preschool children can make use of knowledge about language and categorization to fine tune the mutual exclusivity assumption in order to use it effectively in word learning. 相似文献
2.
A single, indirect exposure to a novel word provides information that could be used to make a fast mapping between the word and its referent, but it is not known how well this initial mapping specifies the function of the new word. The four studies reported here compare preschoolers' (N = 64) fast mapping of new proper and common names following an indirect exposure requiring inference with their learning of new names following ostension. In Study 1, 3-year-olds were shown an animate-inanimate pair of objects and asked to select, for example, Dax, a dax, or one. Children spontaneously selected an animate over an inanimate object as the referent for a novel proper name, but had no animacy preference in common name or baseline conditions. Next, the children were asked to perform actions on, for example, Dax or a dax, when presented with an array of three objects: the one they had just selected, another member of like kind, and a distracter. An indirectly learned proper name was treated as a marker for the originally selected object only, whereas a new common name was generalized to include the other category member. Study 2 showed that mappings made by inference were as robust as those made by ostension. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that even 2-year-olds can learn as much about the function of a new word from an indirect exposure as from ostension. 相似文献
3.
We demonstrate that lexical form class information can play a powerful role in directing the establishment of word-to-object mappings in referentially ambiguous situations. A total of 144 3- and 4-year-olds heard a novel label, modeled syntactically as either a proper name or an adjective, for a stuffed animal of a familiar kind. We then added a second object of the same kind and asked children (1) to choose one of the two objects as the referent of a second novel label, also presented syntactically as either a proper name or an adjective, and (2) to decide whether this second label could also apply to the object they did not choose. In each of three experiments, preschoolers were most likely to reject two words for the same object if both words were proper names (as if one dog could not be both "Fido" and "Rover"). They were significantly less likely to do so if both were adjectives (as if one dog could be both "spotted" and "furry") or if one was a proper name and the other was an adjective (as if one dog could be both "Fido" and "furry"). Information about lexical form class thus contributed significantly to the formation of linkages between words and objects. 相似文献
4.
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
5.
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
6.
To investigate the symbolic quality of preschoolers' gestural representations in the absence of real objects, 48 children (16 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) performed 2 tasks. In the first task, they were asked to pretend to use 8 common objects (e.g., "pretend to brush your teeth with a toothbrush"). There was an age-related progression in the symbolic quality of gestural representations. 3- and 4-year-olds used mostly body part gestures (e.g., using an extended finger as the toothbrush), whereas 5-year-olds used imaginary object gestures (e.g., pretending to hold an imaginary toothbrush). To determine if children's symbolic skill is sufficiently flexible to allow them to use gestures other than those spontaneously produced in the first task, in the second task children were asked to imitate, for each object, a gesture modeled by an experimenter. The modeled gesture was different from the one the child performed on the first task (e.g., if the child used a body part gesture to represent a particular object, the experimenter modeled an imaginary object gesture for that object). Ability to imitate modeled gestures was positively related to age but was also influenced by the symbolic mode of gesture. 3-year-olds could not imitate imaginary object gestures as well as body part gestures, suggesting that young preschoolers have difficulty performing symbolic acts that exceed their symbolic level even when the acts are modeled. Results from both tasks provide strong evidence for a developmental progression from concrete body part to more abstract imaginary object gestural representations during the preschool years. 相似文献
7.
Children show a disambiguation effect--a tendency to select unfamiliar rather than familiar things as the referents of new names. In previous studies, this effect has been reversed in young 2-year-olds, but not older children, by preexposing the unfamiliar objects, suggesting that attraction to novelty controls 2-years-olds' choices of referents for new names, but a mutual exclusivity and/or lexical gap-filling principle determines preschoolers' selections. Both the disambiguation effect and its reversal by preexposure were replicated in the present study; however, 24-month-olds' rate of selecting unfamiliar over familiar kinds was less when they were simply asked to choose between the items than when they were asked to identify the referents of unfamiliar names. Thus, some young children may have both an attraction to novel tokens and a tendency to honor an abstract lexical principle. Referent selections were also affected by object typicality and word similarity. Correlations between the tendency to acknowledge a new name's unfamiliarity and to treat it like a similar-sounding familiar name suggested that youngsters' phonological matching skills affect their interpretation of new names. Also, 4-year-olds who most often mapped distinctive-sounding new names to unfamiliar kinds tended to admit their unfamiliarity with these names most frequently, suggesting that children's increasing awareness of their own knowledge begins to affect their lexical processing during the preschool years. 相似文献
8.
Syntax has been noted to play an important role in word learning in English; it distinguishes the fundamental conceptual difference between individuals (coded as proper nouns), nonindividuals (coded as mass nouns), and classes of individuals (coded as count nouns). The Japanese language does not have grammatical markers flagging the distinctions between count nouns and mass nouns, between proper nouns and common nouns, or between singulars and plurals. How Japanese 2- and 4-year-olds assign meaning to novel nouns associated with familiar and unfamiliar animals and inanimate objects was studied in the research reported here. When a novel label was given to an unfamiliar object, children assumed it to be a name for a basic-level object category whether the referent was an animal or an inanimate object. If the named object already had an established name, and if the object was an inanimate object, the children mapped the noun to a subordinate category. When the named object was an animal, however, they tended to interpret the label as a proper name. These results demonstrated that in the absence of useful information from syntax, 2-year-old Japanese children are able to fast map a noun to its meaning by elegantly coordinating word-learning biases and other available sources of information. 相似文献
9.
Children under 21 /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 principle 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 I 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. 相似文献
10.
Dave G. Mumby Tom J. Kornecook Emma R. Wood John P. J. Pinel 《Learning & behavior》1995,23(4):447-453
Two experiments assessed whether odors left on stimulus objects by experimenters who handle them might confound the interpretation of ostensibly visually guided object-memory tasks for rats. In Experiment 1, rats were able to discriminate the relative recency with which an experimenter touched two otherwise identical objects (intertouch interval = 4 sec), presumably on the basis of an odorintensity discrimination. However, after the rats mastered the odor discrimination with no delay between when the second of the two stimulus objects was last touched by the experimenter and when the rats were permitted to attempt the discrimination, their performance dropped to chance levels when this delay was increased to 15 sec. In Experiment 2, rats were trained in two slightly different ways to perform a delayed-nonmatching-to-sample (DNMS) task, one that involved systematic differences in the temporal order in which the experimenter handled the sample and novel stimulus objects and one that did not. There were no significant differences in the rate at which rats mastered the DNMS task with these two procedures, and the performance of rats that were trained according to the former procedure was unaffected when they were switched to the latter procedure. Moreover, rats required considerably fewer trials to master the DNMS task than the rats in Experiment 1 required to master the odor discrimination. These findings demonstrate that, under certain circumstances, rats can discriminate the relative recency with which two objects are handled by an experimenter, but that this ability contributes little to their performance of conventional object-based DNMS tasks. 相似文献
11.
Children tend to extend object names on the basis of sameness of shape, rather than size, color, or material-a tendency that has been dubbed the "shape bias." Is the shape bias the result of well-learned associations between words and objects? Or does it exist because of a general belief that shape is a good indicator of object category membership? The present three studies addressed this debate by exploring whether the shape bias is specific to naming. In Study 1, 3-year-olds showed the shape bias both when asked to extend a novel name and when asked to select an object of the same kind as a target object. Study 2 found the same shape bias when children were asked to generalize properties relevant to category membership. Study 3 replicated the findings from Study 1 with 2-year-olds. These findings suggest that the shape bias derives from children's beliefs about object kinds and is not the product of associative learning. 相似文献
12.
Two experiments tested the hypothesis that names direct attention at two levels of abstraction: Known names direct attention to the properties most relevant to the specific category; novel names direct attention to the shape, the property most generally relevant across known object names. English-speaking and Japanese-speaking 3-year-olds were shown a novel object that was named with (a) known nouns referring to things similar in shape or similar in material and color, and (b) novel nouns. Given known nouns, children attended to shape when the name referred to a category organized by shape, but they did not when the name referred to a category organized by other properties. Children generalized novel names by shape. The results are discussed within the debate between shape-based and taxonomic categories. 相似文献
13.
Infants'' Contribution to the Achievement of Joint Reference 总被引：7，自引：1，他引：7
Dare A. Baldwin 《Child development》1991,62(5):874-890
This research examines whether infants actively contribute to the achievement of joint reference. One possibility is that infants tend to link a a label with whichever object they are focused on when they hear the label. If so, infants would make a mapping error when an adult labels a different object than the one occupying their focus. Alternatively, infants may be able to use a speaker's nonverbal cues (e.g., line of regard) to interpret the reference of novel labels. This ability would allow infants to avoid errors when adult labels conflict with infants' focus. 64 16-19-month-olds were taught new labels for novel toys in 2 situations. In follow-in labeling, the experimenter looked at and labeled a toy at which infants were already looking. In discrepant labeling, the experimenter looked at and labeled a different toy than the one occupying infants' focus. Infants' responses to subsequent comprehension questions revealed that they (a) successfully learned the labels introduced during follow-in labeling, and (b) displayed no tendency to make mapping errors after discrepant labeling. Thus infants of only 16 to 19 months understand that a speaker's nonverbal cues are relevant to the reference of object labels; they already can contribute to the social coordination involved in achieving joint reference. 相似文献
14.
Infants’ pointing gestures are a critical predictor of early vocabulary size. However, it remains unknown precisely how pointing relates to word learning. The current study addressed this question in a sample of 108 infants, testing one mechanism by which infants’ pointing may influence their learning. In Study 1, 18‐month‐olds, but not 12‐month‐olds, more readily mapped labels to objects if they had first pointed toward those objects than if they had referenced those objects via other communicative behaviors, such as reaching or gaze alternations. In Study 2, when an experimenter labeled a not pointed‐to‐object, 18‐month‐olds’ pointing was no longer related to enhanced fast mapping. These findings suggest that infants’ pointing gestures reflect a readiness and, potentially, a desire to learn. 相似文献
15.
Unobservable properties that are specific to individuals, such as their proper names, can only be known by people who are familiar with those individuals. Do young children utilize this “familiarity principle” when learning language? Experiment 1 tested whether forty-eight 2- to 4-year-old children were able to determine the referent of a proper name such as “Jessie” based on the knowledge that the speaker was familiar with one individual but unfamiliar with the other. Even 2-year-olds successfully identified Jessie as the individual with whom the speaker was familiar. Experiment 2 examined whether children appreciate this principle at a general level, as do adults, or whether this knowledge may be specific to certain word-learning situations. To test this, forty-eight 3- to 5-year-old children were given the converse of the task in Experiment 1—they were asked to determine the individual with whom the speaker was familiar based on the speaker’s knowledge of an individual’s proper name. Only 5-year-olds reliably succeeded at this task, suggesting that a general understanding of the familiarity principle is a relatively late developmental accomplishment. 相似文献
16.
程本学 《华南师范大学学报(社会科学版)》2006,3(3):14-18
摹状词理论与历史因果理论是专名意义问题上的两种对立的理论。从表面上看,这两种理论在专名有无涵义的问题上持截然相反的观点,但仔细分析可以发现,借助于可能世界的观念,它们在某种程度上是可以统一的。因此,将这两种理论结合起来考察专名的意义,就不仅能更好地说明专名的涵义和指称,而且能说明专名涵义的起源。 相似文献
17.
专名和通名分属于不同的语法范畴,一般认为,与通名不同的是,专名只有指称没有内涵,然而它们的区分并非总是界限分明,在特定的语境中专名都有向通名转化的潜力。文章通过英汉人名中的人物特性分析说明不少专名实际上已经发展出了相当稳定的内涵意义。一些典型的通名还有专名的词源背景。专名向通名转化的必要充分条件除了人物的突出特征之外,还应包括文化的促变作用。 相似文献
18.
This study investigated children's understanding of others' intentions in a social learning context. Specifically, it investigated whether knowing an adult's prior intention before the adult gives a demonstration influences what children learn from the demonstration. In the five main experimental conditions, ninety-six 2-year-old children watched as an experimenter (E) pulled out a pin and opened the door of a box. Children in two No Prior Intention conditions saw this demonstration alone or paired with an irrelevant action. Children in three Prior Intention conditions knew what E was trying to do before the demonstration: they first saw E either attempt unsuccessfully to open the door, or visit and open several other containers, or they first saw that the door opened. Children opened the box themselves more often in each of these three conditions than in the two No Prior Intention conditions, even though children in all five conditions saw the exact same demonstration of how to open the box. 相似文献
19.
In three studies, we examined children's geography learning from a physical puzzle and an app designed to mimic the puzzle. In Study 1, 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds were taught Australia's states by an experimenter using a puzzle or were taught by an app. Children learned significantly more states from instruction with the puzzle than when they used the app independently. When children were allowed to bring home the puzzle or app for 1 week in Study 2, total learning between conditions was comparable. Length and frequency of use were related to learning only for puzzle users. In Study 3, children were taught the geography lesson by an experimenter using the app. Children's learning from this social app condition was equal to the social puzzle condition but higher than the solo app condition of the earlier studies, suggesting that learning from digital devices is most successful when supplemented with in‐person social interaction. 相似文献
20.
2 experiments were carried out to investigate 18- to 30-month-old children's memory for the location of a hidden object. In the first experiment, young children were observed in 2 different memory-for-location tasks, both conducted in their own homes. In 1, a toy was hidden in a natural location, and in the other it was hidden in one of a set of boxes with picture cues on top of them. Memory performance was significantly better when the toy was hidden within the natural environment. The effect of different types of hiding locations was examined further in the second experiment. No age differences were found when an object was hidden either in the natural environment or in 1 of a set of unmarked boxes (although performance was better in the former condition). However, in the third condition the older subjects (24-30 months) effectively used a landmark cue (a nearby piece of furniture) to help them remember in which plain box a toy had been hidden, but the young subjects (18-22 months) did not profit from such potential cues. The results, as well as some previous research with delayed-response tasks, were interpreted as reflecting developmental changes in very young children's ability to exploit available cues. The pattern of results suggested the possibility that 2-year-old children are capable of a simple form of mnemonic strategy, actively associating an available cue with the information to be remembered. 相似文献