The Role of Language in the Acquisition of Kind Concepts

这项拟议的研究将调查早期语言习得和儿童如何获得概念之间的关系。具体地说，学习“狗”、“杯”等物体的词汇可以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的物体表征。以前的研究表明，婴儿在一岁结束时个性化物体的能力可能会有一个重大的发展变化：4个月大的婴儿能够使用时空信息来建立对两个不同物体的表征，但直到10到12个月之间的某个时候，他们才能够使用物体种类信息来做到这一点。也就是说，婴儿理解物体在连续的路径上移动，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，如果展示一只玩具鸭和一个杯子从屏幕后面出来，然后一次一个地返回，12个月大的婴儿(而不是10个月大的婴儿)会得出结论，屏幕后面有两个截然不同的物体。此外，一些研究表明，婴儿能够使用标签来促进分类，蹒跚学步的儿童能够使用标签作为归纳推理的信息来源。目前的建议检验了一种假设，即婴儿可能会使用不同的标签来辨别他们所在环境中的物体种类，也就是说，学习像“狗”和“杯”这样的词的过程就是获得狗和杯这两个友好概念的过程。学习这些单词可能会影响婴儿的物体表征、种类概念和进行归纳推理的能力。这些假设将用几种方法进行调查，包括违反预期注视时间法、人工搜索法和归纳推理法。这些实验的结果将有助于更详细和更深入地理解早期语言习得与认知发展之间的关系，在学习计数名词和习得种类概念方面。在未来，这些结果可能会对早期教育的研究人员有所帮助。

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.