FAW: Relations Between Language and Thought in Young Children

有了女性科学家和工程师学院奖，苏珊·A·赫尔曼博士将能够继续研究幼儿语言和思维之间的关系，揭示儿童用来构建知识和经验的原则。她已经发现，儿童利用复杂的策略组织知识的年龄比传统发展理论预测的要早。她通过开发新的实验技术，用于学龄前儿童(直到最近还是一个相对被忽视的年龄段)和对语言和概念的新颖语言学分析，发现了这一点。来自她的实验室的一个具有代表性的发现是，年仅两岁的儿童希望类别成员有重要的、不明显的相似之处，比如内部部件。他们推断，尽管同一类别的成员之间存在显著的知觉差异，但这些成员(例如黑鸟和火烈鸟)具有共同的潜在属性。在某种意义上，年幼的孩子表现得好像某个类别的成员共享一个潜在的“本质”。这种以前未被怀疑的能力与广泛接受的观点相矛盾，即儿童的概念仅限于具体的、感性的和明显的品质。盖尔曼提出，儿童具有超越显著感知特性的早期能力，这种能力早于科学训练，并作为进一步认知发展的机制。除了发展方面的意义外，这些结果还提出了一种新的分类思维方式。心理学中的传统解释将范畴定义为主要由表面和明显特征组成的静态集群。相反，这些发现表明，隐藏的、不明显的特性在心理上很重要。这项工作之所以重要，有几个原因。它将提供有关学龄前概念发展的通常过程的基本信息，有关这些知识的知识应该为教育工作者提供更好的信息呈现方式，以便儿童在进入正规学校时能够掌握这些信息。这些信息也有助于对学龄前儿童仅以非常微妙的方式表现出来的发育障碍发出早期警告，以便在儿童在学校被污名为“学习缓慢的人”或其他类似人之前进行干预计划。它还将帮助一位年轻科学家的职业发展，她有可能成为她所在领域的超级明星之一。

With a Faculty Award for Women Scientists and Engineers, Dr. Susan A. Gelman will be able to continue to study the relations between language and thought in young children, uncovering principles that children use to structure knowledge and experience. She has already discovered that children make use of sophisticated strategies to organize knowledge at an earlier age than traditional theories of development predict. She discovered this by developing new experimental techniques for use with preschool children (until recently a relatively neglected age group) and novel linguistic analyses of language and concepts. One representative finding from her laboratory is that children as young as two-year olds expect category members to share important, nonobvious similarities, such as internal parts. They infer that members of the same category (e.g., blackbird and flamingo) share underlying properties despite salient perceptual dissimilarities between the category members. In a sense, very young children act as if members of a category share an underlying "essence." This previously unsuspected ability contradicts a widely accepted view that children's concepts are limited to concrete, perceptual, and obvious qualities. Gelman has proposed that children have an early capacity to look beyond salient perceptual properties, that this capacity predates training in science, and that it serves as a mechanism for further cognitive development. In addition to the developmental implications, these results suggest a new way of thinking about categorization. Traditional accounts in psychology define categories as static clusters of primarily superficial and obvious features. In contrast, these findings indicate that hidden, nonobvious properties are psychologically important. This work is important for several reasons. It will provide basic information about the usual course of preschool conceptual development, knowledge of which should provide educators with better ways to present information so that it can be grasped by children when they enter formal schooling. The information can also be useful in giving early warning of developmental disabilities that manifest themselves only in very subtle ways in preschoolers, so that intervention programs can be undertaken before the children become stigmatized as "slow learners" or some such in school. It will also assist in the professional development of a young scientist with the potential to become one of the superstars of her field.