Naming practices and the acquisition of key biological concepts - Evidence from English and Indonesian
Naming practices and the acquisition of key biological concepts - Evidence from English and Indonesian
复制标题
DOI：
10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02086.x
复制
发表时间：
2008-04-01
影响因子：
8.2
通讯作者：
Medin, Douglas L.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Anggoro, Florencia K.;Waxman, Sandra R.;Medin, Douglas L.
儿童对基本生物学概念（生物、动物、植物）的习得取决于这些概念的命名方式。在英语中，但在印尼语中，“动物”这个名字是多义的：一种意思包括所有有生命的物体，另一种意思不包括人类。因为名字突出了对象的类别，如果同一个名字（“动物”）指向两个不同的、层次上相关的生物概念，孩子们应该很难确定这个术语及其近邻的范围（例如，“活着”）。对4到9岁的说英语和印尼语的孩子进行的实验表明，“活着”给解释带来了独特的挑战，尤其是对说英语的孩子。当被要求识别“活着”的实体时，说印尼语的年长儿童选择了植物和动物，但说英语的孩子倾向于排除植物，这表明他们可能把“活着”与“动物”的一种感觉混淆了。这项工作强调了在研究生物世界基本概念的习得时考虑语言和文化因素的重要性。
Children's acquisition of fundamental biological concepts (LIVING THING, ANIMAL, PLANT) is shaped by the way these concepts are named. In English, but not Indonesian, the name "animal" is polysemous: One sense includes all animate objects, and the other excludes humans. Because names highlight object categories, if the same name ("animal") points to two different, hierarchically related biological concepts, children should have difficulty settling on the scope of that term and its close neighbors (e.g., "alive"). Experiments with 4- to 9-year-old English- and Indonesian-speaking children revealed that "alive" poses unique interpretive challenges, especially for English-speaking children. When asked to identify entities that are "alive," older Indonesian-speaking children selected both plants and animals, but their English-speaking counterparts tended to exclude plants, which suggests that they may have misaligned "alive" with one of the "animal" senses. This work underscores the importance of considering language and cultural factors in studying the acquisition of fundamental concepts about the biological world.