Hard Words
Hard Words
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DOI：
10.1207/s15473341lld0101_4
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发表时间：
2005-01-01
影响因子：
1.5
通讯作者：
Trueswell, John C.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gleitman, Lila R.;Cassidy, Kimberly;Trueswell, John C.
孩子如何获得词语的意义？为什么对于学习者来说，“知道”这样的词比“狗”或“跳”这样的词更难掌握？我们认为，获取自然语言词汇的主要限制因素不在于克服抽象词义的概念困难，而在于将这些含义映射到其相应的词汇形式。我们立场的这一开端前提虽然存在争议，但与一些先前的方法是相同的。当前的讨论从那里转向如何解决词典映射问题的详细建议，以及支持这一说法的实验结果的介绍。我们描述了一系列重叠的步骤，通过这些步骤，新手可以表示暴露语言的词汇形式和短语结构，这是一种称为句法引导的概率多线索学习过程。该机制是通过单词与世界配对启动的，这是新手从一开始就可以使用的程序，对于表达具体基本概念的词汇项（主要是名词）来说非常有效。有了这些“简单”单词的基础储备，学习者就可以通过不断建立更复杂的语言结构表征的过程来获得进一步的词汇知识。因此，词汇学习可以通过将结构到世界的映射方法添加到早期可用的机制中来进行，从而实现抽象项目（“硬”单词）的有效学习。因此，词汇的习得和子句级语法在整个课程中是相互关联的，而不是语言学习中截然不同和可分离的部分。我们将注意力集中在两个主要问题上。首先是看似有限的句法信息如何如此普遍地影响单词学习。第二个是多个信息源如何汇聚来解决两类动词的词汇学习问题，这些问题给单词到世界的映射过程带来了原则性障碍。这些类型是透视动词（例如，追逐和逃离）和信用动词（例如，思考和知道）。正如我们最后讨论的那样，假设的学习过程的结果是高度词汇化的语法，其有用性并不因成功获取词汇而结束。相反，这些详细且高度结构化的词汇表示服务于增量多线索处理机制，人们通过该机制产生语音并解析他们听到的语音。
How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words such as know harder for learners to acquire than words such as dog or jump? We suggest that the chief limiting factor in acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. This opening premise of our position, while controversial, is shared with some prior approaches. The present discussion moves forward from there to a detailed proposal for how the mapping problem for the lexicon is solved, as well as a presentation of experimental findings that support this account. We describe an overlapping series of steps through which novices move in representing the lexical forms and phrase structures of the exposure language, a probabilistic multiple-cue learning process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The machinery is set in motion by word-to-world pairing, a procedure available to novices from the onset, one that is efficient for a stock of lexical items (mostly nouns) that express concrete basic-level concepts. Armed with this foundational stock of "easy" words, learners achieve further lexical knowledge by an arm-over-arm process in which successively more sophisticated representations of linguistic structure are built. Lexical learning can thereby proceed by adding structure-to-world mapping methods to the earlier available machinery, enabling efficient learning of abstract items-the "hard" words. Thus acquisition of the lexicon and the clause-level syntax are interlocked throughout their course, rather than being distinct and separable parts of language learning. We concentrate detailed attention on two main questions. The first is how syntactic information, seemingly so limited, can affect word learning so pervasively. The second is how multiple sources of information converge to solve lexical learning problems for two types of verbs that pose principled obstacles for word-to-world mapping procedures. These types are perspective verbs (e.g., chase and flee) and credal verbs (e.g., think and know). As we discuss in closing, the outcome of the hypothesized learning procedure is a highly lexicalized grammar whose usefulness does not end with successful acquisition of the lexicon. Rather, these detailed and highly structured lexical representations serve the purposes of the incremental multiple-cue processing machinery by which people produce speech and parse the speech that they hear.