How do children construct linguistic color categories?

当孩子们学习一个新单词，比如一个物体的名字时，他们必须弄清楚其他什么物体应该得到同样的标签。对于颜色词来说，这是一个特别具有挑战性的问题，因为相同颜色类别的不同示例可能差异很大，而且单个颜色标签的确切边界并不明显。例如，一旦孩子知道蓝色可以指天空的颜色，她还必须确定蓝莓、葡萄或草是否得到相同的标签。尽管对成年人来说，区分蓝色与紫色或绿色的界限似乎很简单，但孩子们却会有一些模糊的感觉，而且不同的文化实际上使用不同的颜色类别和不同的界限。例如，在一些文化中，蓝色和绿色的东西用相同的颜色标签。因此，为了学习颜色术语，孩子们必须弄清楚蓝色在哪里开始和结束。目前的研究通过考察英语和Otji-Herero语言的儿童如何解决这个复杂的问题。奥吉-赫雷罗语是纳米比亚农村的一个民族辛巴人说的，它只包含5个颜色术语，而英语使用者通常使用11个颜色术语（红色、橙色、黄色、绿色、蓝色、紫色、粉色、棕色、灰色、黑色和白色）。该研究调查了不同的视觉颜色，结合不同大小和结构的颜色词汇，如何影响个人如何建立颜色词类别。该项目将分三部分研究学习者如何用语言编码颜色。首先，它将使用婴儿友好的眼动追踪方法来测试儿童的早期理解，以确定指导英语学习儿童（18-30个月）第一颜色单词含义的初始假设。第二，项目将纵向检验品类变化。为了做到这一点，研究人员将跟踪儿童，从他们产生第一个颜色单词开始，直到他们掌握所有11个英语基本颜色术语的成人含义。最后，这些自然主义的范畴变化研究将被实验范畴变化研究补充，在实验范畴变化研究中，研究人员向将他们的颜色空间划分为5个（Otji-Herero）或11个（如英语）单词的个体介绍新的颜色单词，同时操纵他们在训练中收到的视觉证据的类型。研究人员还将拍摄参与者的学习环境，以测试视觉体验如何影响颜色单词含义的变化。这些照片将被用来创建一个有价值的在线数据库，作为其他研究人员的资源。利用这些视觉图像以及现有的儿童语言输入数据库，研究人员将构建一个计算模型，研究学习者如何使用视觉和语言信息来构建颜色单词的含义。

When children learn a new word, such as the name for an object, they must then figure out what other objects should receive this same label. This can be an especially challenging problem for color words because different examples of the same color category can vary widely and the exact boundaries of individual color labels are not obvious. For example, once a child learns that blue can refer to the color of the sky, she must also determine whether blueberries, grapes or grass receive the same label. Although the boundaries for what differentiates blue from purple or green seem straightforward to adults, children experience some ambiguity, and different cultures actually employ different color categories with different boundaries. For example, some cultures refer to blue and green things with the same color label. Thus, to learn color terms, children must figure out where blue begins and ends. The current research investigates how children solve this complex problem by examining color word learning in speakers of English and Otji-Herero. Otji-Herero is spoken by the Himba, an ethnic group in rural Namibia, and contains only 5 color terms to cover the same range of colors that English speakers typically label using 11 terms (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, gray, black and white). The research investigates how differences in exposure to visual colors, combined with differently sized and structured color vocabularies, affect how individuals establish color word categories.The project will investigate how learners encode color with language in three parts. First, it will test children's early comprehension using infant-friendly eye-tracking methods to determine the initial assumptions that guide first color word meanings in English-learning children (18-30 months). Second, the project will test longitudinal category change. To do so, the researchers will follow children from the time they produce their first color words until they acquire adult-like meanings for all 11 English basic color terms. Finally, these naturalistic studies of category change will be complemented by studies of experimental categorical change in which researchers introduce new color words to individuals who have divided their color space into 5 (Otji-Herero) or 11 (as in English) words while manipulating the type of visual evidence they receive during training. The researchers will also photograph the learning environments of participants to test how visual experience impacts changes in color word meanings. These photographs will be used to create a valuable online database as a resource for other researchers. Using these visual images as well as existing databases on children's linguistic input, the researchers will construct a computational model of how learners use visual and linguistic information to construct color word meanings.