Why It Is Hard to Label Our Concepts.
Why It Is Hard to Label Our Concepts.
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为什么很难给我们的概念贴上标签。
DOI：
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发表时间：
2004
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Waxman
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
J. Snedeker;L. Gleitman;Hall;Waxman
但是，如果我们在出生前获得的知识在出生前就被我们遗忘了，而后来通过感官的运用我们又重新获得了我们以前所知道的知识，那么，我们称之为学习的东西难道不是一种恢复我们知识的过程吗？这难道不可以恰当地称为回忆吗？——柏拉图《费多篇》（公元前412年）在婴儿习得母语之前，我们可以把他们看作是第二语言（或转世）学习者，他们的任务只是在单词和句子的层面上找出先前已知的概念是如何映射到语言形式上的。这些柏拉图式的婴儿的生活将比奎因的语言学家所面临的要容易得多，因为他们被困在一个异国他乡，不仅发音不同，而且思维方式也可能与自己的不同。我们在这里问这些模型中哪一个更接近真实情况，将注意力集中在获取第一个词汇的任务上。本章提出的这个问题的测试平台涉及儿童在生命的前三年词汇的变化特征。具体来说，在各种语言和非常不同的养育条件下，第一个词汇（前100个左右），与输入语料库中的频率相比，大量过度代表名词词汇类，而大量低于代表动词。第二个被广泛观察到的特征是，那些在儿童语言和理解的最早阶段出现的动词在很大程度上仅限于行动术语，如go、run和throw，尽管像think和look这样的动词在母亲的语言中经常出现。是什么造成了这样的投入产出差距？从广义上讲，我们可以区分出词汇发展方面系统性不同步的两种一般解释。第一种方法强调儿童的认知发展。另一种观点强调语言的发展，我们将在本章中为之辩护。维持后一种立场的负担在于理解为什么抽象词汇显然比具体词汇更难获得。很有可能，词汇在发展过程中的变化特征通常被用来反映儿童概念生活的变化特征。这种假设主要有两种，取决于认知变化的因果机制是成熟的还是经验的。但在这两种情况下，函数随时间的变化被赋…
1 But if the knowledge which we acquired before birth was lost by us at birth, and afterwards by the use of the senses we recovered that which we previously knew, will not that which we call learning be a process of recovering our knowledge, and may not this be rightly termed recollection?-Plato, Phaedo (c.a. 412BCE) One way to think about infants before they acquire their native tongue is as second-language (or reincarnated) learners whose task is only to find out how priorly known concepts, at the level of both words and sentences, are mapped onto linguistic forms. Life for these Platonic infants would be much easier than that faced by Quine's linguist, trapped in an exotic land where not only pronunciations but, simultaneously, the modes of thought, may be different from one's own. We ask here which of these models is closer to the real case, concentrating attention on the task of acquiring a first lexicon. The test bed for this question as raised in this chapter concerns the changing character of child vocabularies in the first three years of life. Specifically, the first vocabulary (the first 100 words or so), in various languages and under marvelously varying child-rearing conditions, massively over-represents the noun lexical class, compared to its frequency in the input corpus, and massively under-represents the verbs. A second widely observed property is that those verbs that do appear at the earliest stages of child speech and comprehension are largely limited to action terms such as go, run, and throw even though verbs like think and look are frequent in maternal speech. What accounts for such input-output disparities? Speaking very broadly, we can distinguish two general kinds of explanations for these systematic asynchronies in aspects of vocabulary development. The first of these emphasizes children's cognitive development. The alternative, which we will try to defend in this chapter, emphasizes linguistic development. The burden in maintaining this latter stance is to understand why, all the same, the abstract words are manifestly harder to acquire than the concrete ones. Plausibly enough, the changing character of vocabularies over developmental time is usually taken to reflect the changing character of the child's conceptual life. This kind of hypothesis comes in two main flavors, depending on whether the causal machinery for cognitive change is taken to be maturational or experiential. But in either case, the changes in the function over time are assigned …