FAW: Relations Between Language and Thought in Young Children

FAW：幼儿语言与思维的关系

• 批准号: 9100348
• 负责人: Susan Gelman
• 金额: $ 25万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1991
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1991-11-01 至 1996-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9100348&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: FAW; Relations; Between; Language; Thought

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.

获得女科学家和工程师学院奖后，Susan a . Gelman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，儿童使用复杂的策略来组织知识的年龄比传统发展理论预测的要早。她发现这一点是通过开发新的实验技术，用于学龄前儿童（直到最近，一个相对被忽视的年龄组）和对语言和概念的新颖语言分析。她实验室的一个代表性发现是，两岁大的孩子都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，尽管类别成员之间存在显著的感知差异，但同一类别的成员（例如，黑鸟和火烈鸟）具有共同的潜在属性。从某种意义上说，非常年幼的孩子表现得好像一个类别的成员共享一个潜在的“本质”。人们普遍认为儿童的概念仅限于具体的、感性的和明显的品质，而这种以前未被怀疑的能力与这种观点相矛盾。Gelman提出，儿童很早就有能力超越显著的感知特性，这种能力在科学训练之前就有了，它是进一步认知发展的一种机制。除了发展意义之外，这些结果还提出了一种思考分类的新方法。心理学的传统解释将类别定义为主要是表面和明显特征的静态集群。相反，这些发现表明隐藏的、不明显的特性在心理上是重要的。这项工作之所以重要，有几个原因。它将提供关于学前概念发展通常过程的基本信息，这些知识应该为教育者提供更好的方式来呈现信息，以便儿童在进入正规学校时能够掌握。这些信息还有助于对学龄前儿童以非常微妙的方式表现出来的发育障碍进行早期预警，以便在儿童在学校被污名为“学习速度慢”或其他类似情况之前实施干预方案。它还将帮助有潜力成为该领域超级明星之一的年轻科学家的专业发展。