Do young children have adult-like syntactic categories? Zipf's law and the case of the determiner.
Do young children have adult-like syntactic categories? Zipf's law and the case of the determiner.
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小孩子有类似成人的句法类别吗？
DOI：
10.1016/j.cognition.2013.02.006
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发表时间：
2013
期刊：
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Pine JM
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Pine JM
语法发展的生成主义模型假设儿童从最早的可观察阶段就具有类似成人的语法类别，而建构主义模型则假设儿童的早期类别范围更为有限。在本文中，我们针对一个特定的句法类别（限定词）来测试这些假设。这是通过比较名词集中重叠的受控测量来完成的，儿童及其照顾者在他们的自发言语中使用限定词类别的不同实例。在一系列研究中，我们表明，首先，在比较儿童和成人重叠测量时，控制样本量和词汇范围非常重要；其次，一旦应用了适当的控制，幼儿在言语中使用限定词 a/an 和 the 的名词重叠就会明显少于他们的照顾者使用这些相同限定词的名词的重叠；第三，儿童使用的名词与限定词 a/an 的（受控）重叠程度，并且在发展过程中显着增加。这意味着儿童在最早的可观察阶段并不具有类似成人的限定词类别，并且他们对限定词类别的了解只是根据其语言经验逐渐接近成人的知识。
Generativist models of grammatical development assume that children have adult-like grammatical categories from the earliest observable stages, whereas constructivist models assume that children’s early categories are more limited in scope. In the present paper, we test these assumptions with respect to one particular syntactic category, the determiner. This is done by comparing controlled measures of overlap in the set of nouns with which children and their caregivers use different instances of the determiner category in their spontaneous speech. In a series of studies, we show, first, that it is important to control for both sample size and vocabulary range when comparing child and adult overlap measures; second, that, once the appropriate controls have been applied, there is significantly less overlap in the nouns with which young children use the determiners a/an and the in their speech than in the nouns with which their caregivers use these same determiners; and, third, that the level of (controlled) overlap in the nouns that the children use with the determiners a/an and the increases significantly over the course of development. The implication is that children do not have an adult-like determiner category during the earliest observable stages, and that their knowledge of the determiner category only gradually approximates that of adults as a function of their linguistic experience.