The Role of Language in the Acquisition of Kind Concepts

语言在习得善良概念中的作用

• 批准号: 9910729
• 负责人: Fei Xu
• 金额: $ 4.2万
• 依托单位: Northeastern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2000
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2000-08-01 至 2001-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9910729&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Role; Language; Acquisition; Kind; Concepts

The proposed research will investigate the relation between early language acquisition and how children acquire concepts. Specifically, how learning words for kinds of objects such as "dog" and "cup" may lead the infant to organize the world in terms of kinds of physical entities and how this process changes the infant's object representations. Previous studies have shown that there may be a major developmental change in infant's ability to individuate objects towards the end of the first year: Infants as young as 4 months are able to use spatiotemporal information for establishing representations of two distinct objects, but it is not until somewhere between 10 and 12 months that they are able to use object kind information to do so. That is, infants understand that objects travel on continuous paths and if a spatiotemporal discontinuity is detected, they will conclude that a second, distinct object is involved. In contrast, if shown, say, a toy duck and a cup emerging from behind a screen and returning, one at a time, 12- but not 10-month-old infants would conclude that there are two distinct objects behind the screen. Furthermore, several studies have shown that infants are able to use labeling to facilitate categorization and toddlers are able to use labels as a source of information for inductive inference. The current proposal tests the hypothesis that infants may use distinct labels to pick out the kinds of objects in their environment, that is, the process of learning words such as "dog" and "cup" is the process of acquiring kind concepts dog and cup. Learning these words may subsequently impact on infants' object representations, their concept of kind, and their ability to make inductive inference. These hypotheses will be investigated with several methods, including a violation of expectancy looking time method, a manual search method, and an inductive inference method. The results of these experiments should lead to a more detailed and deeper understanding of the relation between early language acquisition and cognitive development in the domain of learning count nouns and acquiring kind concepts. In the future these results may be helpful to researchers in early education.

本研究将探讨幼儿早期语言习得与概念习得之间的关系。具体来说，学习诸如“狗”和“杯子”等物体的词语如何引导婴儿根据各种物理实体来组织世界，以及这个过程如何改变婴儿对物体的表征。先前的研究表明，婴儿在第一年末个性化物体的能力可能会发生重大的发展变化：4个月大的婴儿能够使用时空信息来建立两个不同物体的表征，但直到10到12个月大的时候，他们才能够使用物体种类信息来做到这一点。也就是说，婴儿明白物体沿着连续的路径移动，如果检测到时空不连续，他们会得出结论，认为有第二个不同的物体存在。相比之下，如果给12个月（而不是10个月）大的婴儿看一只玩具鸭子和一个杯子从屏幕后面出来，然后一个一个地回来，他们就会得出结论，屏幕后面有两个不同的物体。此外，一些研究表明，婴儿能够使用标签来促进分类，幼儿能够使用标签作为归纳推理的信息来源。目前的建议验证了婴儿可能使用不同的标签来挑选环境中物体的种类的假设，即学习“狗”和“杯子”等单词的过程是获得狗和杯子这类概念的过程。学习这些单词可能会对婴儿的物体表征、种类概念和归纳推理能力产生影响。这些假设将用几种方法进行调查，包括违反期望查找时间法、人工搜索法和归纳推理法。这些实验的结果将有助于我们更详细、更深入地了解早期语言习得与数名词学习和类概念习得之间的关系。在未来，这些结果可能会对早期教育的研究人员有所帮助。