The Role of Language in the Acquisition of Kind Concepts

本研究将探讨早期语言习得与儿童概念习得的关系。 具体来说，学习单词的各种对象，如“狗”和“杯”可能会导致婴儿组织世界的各种物理实体和这个过程如何改变婴儿的对象表征。 先前的研究表明，婴儿在第一年结束时个体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个月之间，他们才能够使用物体种类信息来这样做。 也就是说，婴儿理解物体在连续的路径上行进，如果检测到时空不连续，他们将得出结论，涉及第二个不同的物体。 相比之下，如果看到一只玩具鸭和一个杯子从屏幕后面出现并返回，一次一个，12个月大的婴儿（而不是10个月大的婴儿）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。 目前的建议测试的假设，婴儿可能会使用不同的标签，以挑选出各种物体在他们的环境中，也就是说，学习的过程中，如“狗”和“杯”的过程是获得的狗和杯的概念。 学习这些单词可能会影响婴儿的物体表征，他们的种类概念，以及他们进行归纳推理的能力。 这些假设将与几种方法进行调查，包括违反预期的注视时间的方法，人工搜索方法，和归纳推理方法。 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认知发展之间在学习可数名词和获得类概念方面的关系。 这些结果可能对未来的早期教育研究者有所帮助。

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.