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Young children's understanding of function words and their developing theory of mind

幼儿对虚词的理解及其心理理论的发展

基本信息

批准号：
15500171
负责人：
MATSUI Tomoko
金额：
$ 2.3万
依托单位：
Kyoto University (2005)International Christian University (2003-2004)
依托单位国家：
日本
项目类别：
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
财政年份：
2003
资助国家：
日本
起止时间：
2003 至 2005
项目状态：
已结题

项目摘要

In the study reported here, Japanese-speaking children aged 3 to 6 were confronted with making choices based on conflicting input from speakers who varied in the degree of certainty and the quality of evidence they possessed for their opinions. Certainty and evidentiality are encoded in Japanese both in high-frequency ; closed-class, sentence-final particles and also in low-frequency, mental state verbs. Our results suggest that children are able to make use of information encoded in the sentence-final particles earlier than information encoded in verbs ; and that understanding of speaker certainty precedes understanding of quality of evidence. Furthermore, although the results generally support the position that children's overall understanding of epistemic vocabulary correlates with their understanding of false-belief, understanding of the sentence-final particles tested did not correlate with false-belief understanding.That particles are understood earlier than verbs are can be acco … More unted for in a number of ways. It has been suggested that linguistic items that appear with high frequency in child-directed speech will receive special cognitive salience in child's mind, and as such, may have significant influence to a child's semantic and cognitive development (Choi & Gopnik 1995; Gopnik, Choi, & Baumberger 1996). In the present study, the analysis of Japanese corpus data confirmed the high frequency of sentence-final particles in the mother's speech, and thus, the result tends to support this hypothesis. However, as our data consists of only one child-mother pair, further data is needed to confirm the exact causal relations.It is our belief that early understanding of particles provides important information about children's understanding of other's epistemic mental states in general. One of the most intriguing results of our study is that understanding of particles does not correlate with understanding of false-belief. It is now widely assumed that passing false-belief tasks involves explicit representational theory of mind (Perner 1991). However, there is currently little agreement as to whether children can grasp others' mental states prior to that, and if they do, how. It has been reported that children who fail false-belief tasks show procedural, unconscious grasp of other's mental states through eye-gaze, and such understanding has been called ‘implicit' understanding of another's mind (Clements & Perner 1994;Ruffman 2000). We are inclined to believe that Japanese 3-year-olds' understanding of other's knowledge states may similarly be of an implicit kind, though the concept of implicit understanding itself requires further clarification. What the current study has shown, however, is that a consistent, working understanding of knowledge states precedes fully representational understanding of (false) beliefs. Less

在这里报道的这项研究中，3到6岁的说日语的儿童面临着根据说话者的不同输入做出选择，这些说话者的确定性程度和他们为自己的观点掌握的证据质量各不相同。确定性和证据性在日语中既有高频的封闭式句末助词，也有频率较低的心理动词。我们的结果表明，儿童能够利用句子末级助词中编码的信息，而不是动词中编码的信息；而且，对说话人确定性的理解先于对证据质量的理解。此外，尽管结果普遍支持儿童对认知词汇的整体理解与他们对错误信念的理解相关的观点，但对所测试的句末助词的理解与错误信念理解并不相关。这些助词比动词更早被理解…在许多方面都有更多的未知数。有人认为，在儿童言语中出现频率较高的语言项目在儿童头脑中会受到特殊的认知突显，因此可能对儿童的语义和认知发展产生重大影响(Choi&Gopnik 1995；Gopnik，Choi，&Baumberger 1996)。在本研究中，通过对日语语料库的分析，证实了母亲言语中句末助词出现的频率很高，因此，结果倾向于支持这一假说。然而，由于我们的数据只包含一个孩子-母亲对，还需要进一步的数据来证实确切的因果关系。我们认为，早期对粒子的理解有助于儿童对他人总体认知心理状态的理解。我们研究中最有趣的结果之一是，对粒子的理解与对错误信念的理解并不相关。现在人们普遍认为，传递错误信念任务涉及到心理的外显表征理论(Perner，1991)。然而，关于孩子们是否能在此之前掌握他人的心理状态，如果他们做到了，又是如何做到的，目前几乎没有达成一致意见。据报道，错误信念任务失败的儿童通过眼睛凝视表现出对他人心理状态的程序性、无意识的理解，这种理解被称为对他人心理的内隐理解(Clements&Perner 1994；Ruffman 2000)。我们倾向于认为，日本3岁儿童对他人知识状态的理解可能同样是一种内隐理解，尽管内隐理解的概念本身需要进一步澄清。然而，目前的研究表明，对知识状态的一致、有效的理解先于对(错误)信念的完全代表性理解。较少