Learning Verbs in English and Korean: The Roles of Word Order and Argument Drop
Learning Verbs in English and Korean: The Roles of Word Order and Argument Drop
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学习英语和韩语动词：词序和参数删除的作用
DOI：
10.1080/15475441.2023.2165926
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发表时间：
2023
影响因子：
1.5
通讯作者：
Arunachalam, Sudha
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Shi, Huanhuan;He, Angela Xiaoxue;Song, Hyun-Joo;Jin, Kyong-Sun;Arunachalam, Sudha
为了学习新单词，特别是动词，儿童学习者已经被证明从单词出现的语言环境中受益。然而，跨语言的差异会影响这一过程的展开。先前的一项研究发现，孩子们学习一个新动词的能力在韩语和英语中不同，这是由于动词所在的句子的作用。作者假设，在这两种语言中，词序和论元删除的性质是导致差异的原因，这两种语言之间的差异是系统的。在目前的研究中，我们继续研究这一发现，以询问这种差异是否会在以后的发展中持续存在，或者如果获得不同语言的儿童随着他们的语言知识和学习能力的增加而变得更加相似。学龄前单语英语学习者(N=80)和单语韩国学习者(N=)被呈现在不同语序、论元丢弃和伴随的视觉刺激的语境中的新动词。我们通过测量强迫选择指向任务的准确性来评估他们的学习，并在学习阶段测量眼睛凝视作为他们将新动词映射到意义的过程的指示器。与之前的研究不同的是，我们的研究发现了两岁儿童在类似任务中学习英语和韩语的差异，我们的结果揭示了这两个语言组与这些年龄较大的学龄前儿童之间的相似之处。我们将我们的结果解释为证据，证明在儿童早期的过程中，儿童变得善于从各种不同的环境中学习，从而缩小了不同语言学习者之间的差异。
To learn new words, particularly verbs, child learners have been shown to benefit from the linguistic contexts in which the words appear. However, cross-linguistic differences affect how this process unfolds. One previous study found that children’s abilities to learn a new verb differed across Korean and English as a function of the sentence in which the verb occurred. The authors hypothesized that the properties of word order and argument drop, which vary systematically in these two languages, were driving the differences. In the current study, we pursued this finding to ask if the difference persists later in development, or if children acquiring different languages come to appear more similar as their linguistic knowledge and learning capacities increase. Preschool-aged monolingual English learners (N = 80) and monolingual Korean learners (N = 64) were presented with novel verbs in contexts that varied in word order and argument drop and accompanying visual stimuli. We assessed their learning by measuring accuracy in a forced-choice pointing task, and we measured eye gaze during the learning phase as an indicator of the processes by which they mapped the novel verbs to meaning. Unlike previous studies which identified differences between English and Korean learning 2-year-olds in a similar task, our results revealed similarities between the two language groups with these older preschoolers. We interpret our results as evidence that over the course of early childhood, children become adept at learning from a large variety of contexts, such that differences between learners of different languages are attenuated.