Young German children's early syntactic competence: a preferential looking study
Young German children's early syntactic competence: a preferential looking study
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DOI：
10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00703.x
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发表时间：
2008-07-01
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Tomasello, Michael
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Dittmar, Miriam;Abbot-Smith, Kirsten;Tomasello, Michael
Gertner，Fisher and Eschenhengart（2006）使用一种新动词的优先观察方法，发现21个月大的英语儿童似乎以抽象的、动词一般的方式理解及物语序的句法标记。在目前的研究中，我们测试了德国同龄儿童是否有同样的理解。根据Gertner等人（2006）的研究，一组德国儿童在接受了包含及物性句子的训练/练习阶段后才接受测试，这些句子中有熟悉的动词和与测试中使用的名词完全相同的名词。第二组在训练/练习阶段后进行测试，只包括熟悉的动词，没有测试中使用的名词。只有接受完整及物句训练的儿童在测试中获得成功。这些研究结果表明，对于这么小的孩子来说，要想在句法理解测试中取得成功，他们必须首先在测试之前有某种相关的语言经验-这就提出了儿童在这个早期发展阶段的语言表征的性质问题。
Using a preferential looking methodology with novel verbs, Gertner, Fisher and Eisengart (2006) found that 21-month-old English children seemed to understand the syntactic marking of transitive word order in an abstract, verb-general way. In the current study we tested whether young German children of this same age have this same understanding. Following Gertner et al. (2006), one group of German children was tested only after they had received a training/practice phase containing transitive sentences with familiar verbs and the exact same nouns as those used at test. A second group was tested after a training/practice phase consisting only of familiar verbs, without the nouns used at test. Only the group of children with the training on full transitive sentences was successful in the test. These findings suggest that for children this young to succeed in this test of syntactic understanding, they must first have some kind of relevant linguistic experience immediately prior to testing - which raises the question of the nature of children's linguistic representations at this early point in development.