Finding one's meaning: A test of the relation between quantifiers and integers in language development
Finding one's meaning: A test of the relation between quantifiers and integers in language development
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cogpsych.2008.07.001
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发表时间：
2009-03-01
影响因子：
2.6
通讯作者：
Yang, Shu-Ju
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Barner, David;Chow, Katherine;Yang, Shu-Ju
我们探索了儿童对数字和语言数字标记的早期解释，以检验以下假设（例如，Carey (2004)。Bootstrapping and the origin of Concepts. Daedalus. 59-68），即儿童对一个数字和其他数字（即两个、三个等）的最初区别是从单数和复数名词之间的先前区别中引导出来的。先前的研究表明，在没有单复数形态的语言中，如日语和汉语，儿童获得单词含义的时间比在英语和俄语等单复数语言中晚。在两个实验中，我们试图证实英语中语法数和整数习得之间的关系。我们发现，即使在控制年龄影响的情况下，儿童对数字的理解与大量自然语言量词和限定词之间也存在显着相关性。然而，我们还发现，刚刚学习单复数形态和单词“一”的 2 岁儿童无法对单数名词短语（例如，香蕉）做出准确的解释，尽管将其解释为准确的。例如，在真值判断任务中，大多数孩子判断香蕉与一组两个物体一致，尽管拒绝将两个物体作为数字一个。此外，相对于没有给出精确的单数名词的孩子来说，给出精确的一个宾语的孩子对数字的理解并不好。因此，我们得出的结论是，这个年龄段的儿童量词理解和数字理解之间的相关性并不归因于促进单词一习得的单复数区别。我们认为量词在强调数字的语义功能方面发挥着更普遍的作用，并且孩子们从一开始就区分数字和其他量词，只为数字分配精确的解释。 (c) 2008 Elsevier Inc. 保留所有权利。
We explored children's early interpretation of numerals and linguistic number marking, in order to test the hypothesis (e.g., Carey (2004). Bootstrapping and the origin of concepts. Daedalus. 59-68) that children's initial distinction between one and other numerals (i.e., two, three, etc.) is bootstrapped from a prior distinction between singular and plural nouns. Previous studies have presented evidence that in languages Without singular-plural morphology, like Japanese and Chinese, children acquire the meaning of the word one later than in singular-plural languages like English and Russian. In two experiments, we sought to corroborate this relation between grammatical number and integer acquisition within English. We found a significant correlation between children's comprehension of numerals and a large set of natural language quantifiers and determiners, even when controlling for effects due to age. However, we also found that 2-year-old children, who are just acquiring singular-plural morphology and the word one, fail to assign an exact interpretation to singular noun phrases (e.g., a banana), despite interpreting one as exact. For example, in a Truth-value judgment task, most children judged that a banana was consistent with a set of two objects, despite rejecting sets of two for the numeral one. Also, children who gave exactly one object for singular nouns did not have a better comprehension of numerals relative to children who did not give exactly one. Thus, we conclude that the correlation between quantifier comprehension and numeral comprehension in children of this age is not attributable to the singular-plural distinction facilitating the acquisition of the word one. We argue that quantifiers play a more general role in highlighting the semantic function of numerals, and that children distinguish between numerals and other quantifiers from the beginning, assigning exact interpretations only to numerals. (c) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.