Syntax Constrains the Acquisition of Verb Meaning
Syntax Constrains the Acquisition of Verb Meaning
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DOI：
10.1080/15475440701542609
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发表时间：
2007-01-01
影响因子：
1.5
通讯作者：
Christophe, Anne
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bernal, Savita;Lidz, Jeffrey;Christophe, Anne
婴儿能否利用未知单词的句法上下文来推断它是动词，从而指代某个动作？二十三个月大的法国婴儿在观看移动物体时被教授了新的动词，句子中只包含功能词（例如“il poune par la”/“it's pooning there”）。然后，婴儿观看两个物体经历熟悉或新奇动作的实例，并被要求指向与新奇动词匹配的屏幕。婴儿更经常正确地指向熟悉的动作。为了检查他们是否只是坚持指向熟悉的场景，对照组婴儿被教导关于相同视觉刺激的新名词（例如“un poune est la”/“a poon is here”）。与学习动词的婴儿相反，学习名词的婴儿更频繁地指出新奇的动作。这些结果证实了这样的假设：功能词和更一般的句法结构支持早期词汇习得。
Can infants use the syntactic context of an unknown word to infer that it is a verb, and thus refers to an action? Twenty-three-month-old French infants watching a moving object were taught novel verbs, within sentences that contained only function words (e.g. "il poune par la" / "it's pooning there"). Infants then watched two instances of the object undergoing either the familiar or a novel action and were asked to point towards the screen matching the novel verb. Infants correctly pointed more often towards the familiar action. To check that they did not simply perseverate in pointing at the familiar scene, control infants were taught novel nouns on the same visual stimuli (e.g. "un poune est la"/" a poon is here"). Contrary to verb-learning infants, noun-learning infants pointed more often to the novel action. These results confirm the hypothesis that function words, and more generally syntactic structure, support early lexical acquisition.