SYNTACTIC CUES IN THE ACQUISITION OF COLLECTIVE NOUNS
SYNTACTIC CUES IN THE ACQUISITION OF COLLECTIVE NOUNS
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DOI：
10.1016/0010-0277(94)00648-5
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发表时间：
1995-07-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
KELEMEN, D
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
BLOOM, P;KELEMEN, D
词汇学习研究的一个基本发现是，儿童倾向于把描述一个物体的词当作是指整个物体的种类，而不是指物体的一部分、它的一种属性或组成物体的物质。这已经被认为是证据，存在着某些特殊的限制词的意义，引导儿童倾向于一种对象的解释时，暴露在一个新的单词。然而，这一建议存在描述性问题，因为它无法解释儿童如何学习其他类型的单词，例如特定人物、物质、部件、事件、集合和时间段的名称。这些问题激发了另一种理论，即幼儿拥有几个不同的概念类别，包括“个体”，这比“整体对象”更抽象，并且可以使用句法线索来确定一个新词所属的概念类别。这一理论在两个实验中进行了探索，我们试图使用句法线索来教儿童和成人新的集体名词-指的是一组物体的单词。结果表明，儿童可以使用这些线索来学习不是完整物体的各种个体的名称，尽管他们的能力不如成年人。候选人解释为什么存在这种发展差异进行了讨论，并得出的单词学习和概念表征的理论的影响。
One basic finding in the study of word learning is that children tend to construe a word describing an object as referring to the kind of whole object, rather than to a part of the object, one of its properties, or the substance it is made of. This has been taken as evidence that there exist certain special constraints on word meaning that guide children to favor the kind-of-object interpretation when exposed to a new word. There are descriptive problems with this proposal, however, as it cannot explain how children learn other kinds of words, such as names for specific people, substances, parts, events, collections, and periods of time. These problems motivate an alternative theory in which young children possess several distinct conceptual categories-including ''individual'', which is more abstract than ''whole object'' - and can use syntactic cues to determine the conceptual category that a new word belongs to. This theory is explored in two experiments in which we attempt to use syntactic cues to teach children and adults novel collective nouns - words that refer to groups of objects. The results indicate that children can use such cues to learn names for kinds of individuals that are not whole objects, although they are less able to do so than adults. Candidate explanations for why this developmental difference exists are discussed and implications are drawn for theories of word learning and conceptual representation.