Human simulations of vocabulary learning
Human simulations of vocabulary learning
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DOI：
10.1016/s0010-0277(99)00036-0
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发表时间：
1999-12-07
期刊：
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Lederer, A
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gillette, J;Gleitman, H;Lederer, A
本文通过实验研究了一个关于词汇习得的惊人概括：在儿童语言发展的早期阶段，名词学习上级动词学习。对这一现象的主要解释在文献中调用不同的概念要求的项目在这些词汇类别：动词是认知比名词更复杂，所以他们的收购必须等待一定的心理发展的婴儿。在本研究中，我们探讨了另一种假设，即决定习得顺序的是动词学习的信息要求，而不是概念要求。有效的动词学习需要接触到暴露语言的结构特征，因此只有在名词知识的支架能够获得小句级别的句法时才能进行。更一般地说，我们的实验研究的假设，词汇习得发生通过增量约束满足过程，引导自己到连续更复杂的语言表示，反过来，使新的词汇学习。如果实验对象是年幼的儿童，就很难区分这种以信息为中心的假设和概念变化假设。因此，实验的“学习者”是成年人。在实验中要“获得”的项目是从母亲对18-24个月大的婴儿的讲话样本中获得的24个最常见的名词和24个最常见的动词。不同的实验询问的信息，将支持识别这些词，因为它们出现在母亲对孩子的话语。正确识别的比例和可识别的单词类型都随着信息类型的变化而发生显着变化。我们讨论这些结果一致的认知和语用复杂的人类婴儿的高度词汇化的语法的增量建设，但不一致的过程中，词汇习得是独立的和先行的语法习得。(C)1999 Elsevier Science B. V.保留所有权利。
The work reported here experimentally investigates a striking generalization about vocabulary acquisition: Noun learning is superior to verb learning in the earliest moments of child language development. The dominant explanation of this phenomenon in the literature invokes differing conceptual requirements for items in these lexical categories: Verbs are cognitively more complex than nouns and so their acquisition must await certain mental developments in the infant. In the present work, we investigate an alternative hypothesis; namely, that it is the information requirements of verb learning, not the conceptual require -ments, that crucially determine the acquisition order. Efficient verb learning requires access to structural features of the exposure language and thus cannot take place until a scaffolding of noun knowledge enables the acquisition of clause-level syntax. More generally, we experimentally investigate the hypothesis that vocabulary acquisition takes place via an incremental constraint-satisfaction procedure that bootstraps itself into successively more sophisticated linguistic representations which, in turn, enable new kinds of vocabulary learning. If the experimental subjects were young children, it would be difficult to distinguish between this information-centered hypothesis and the conceptual change hypothesis. Therefore the experimental "learners" are adults. The items to be "acquired" in the experiments were the 24 most frequent nouns and 24 most frequent verbs from a sample of maternal speech to 18-24-month-old infants. The various experiments ask about the kinds of information that will support identification of these words as they occur in mother-to-child discourse. Both the proportion correctly identified and the type of word that is identifiable changes significantly as a function of information type. We discuss these results as consistent with the incremental construction of a highly lexicalized grammar by cognitively and pragmatically sophisticated human infants, but inconsistent with a procedure in which lexical acquisition is independent of and antecedent to syntax acquisition. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.