Children's theory of word meaning : The role of shape similarity in early acquisition.

本研究对比了儿童词义假设的两种重要假设：分类假设假设和知觉(颜色或形状)偏向假设。这两种观点都认为儿童关注的是词义延伸中的“相似类”群体，但他们对幼儿“相似”的性质的假设有所不同。我们通过在词/非词匹配到样本任务中分离和比较类别成员资格和总体相似度来测试这两个建议。在第一个实验中，三个年龄段的儿童，3岁、4岁和5岁，被展示了一个标准物体和另外三张图片：一个分类相似的物体，一个主题相似的物体，以及一个感知相似的物体。他们被问到：“这是一个…；给我看另一个DAX”，或者“找一个和这个相配的”。在完成实验后，为了确定孩子们是否可以转移到第一个刺激的另一个维度，研究人员要求孩子们“再找一个和这个相配的。”结果主要有三个。首先，当给出新词时，三个年龄组呈现出从基于主题的反应到基于知觉的反应的显著转变。第二，在一个新词的存在下，发现了从知觉反应到分类反应的发展转变。在第二个实验中，我们使用美国版作为刺激，并重复与实验一相同的步骤。实验一的大部分结果得到了证实，但形状偏向的作用很大。实验三坚持儿童注意是如何被引导到分类维度的。我们设置了两个训练条件：提供物体功能信息的组和关注物体共性的信息组，控制组与实验一和实验二的新水平条件相同。主要结果是，幼儿在没有物体功能信息的情况下不能注意分类维度。这些结果表明，知觉相似性在早期词义习得中非常重要，但儿童的注意力逐渐转移到更深层次的性质上。我们推测，这种对知觉相似性的早期关注可能有助于幼儿学习类别，逐渐引导他们形成一种超越知觉相似性的分类关系。较少

This research contrasts two important proposals as to children's assumptions about word meanings : the taxonomic assumption proposal and the perceptual (color or shape) bias proposal. Both proposals agree that childen focus on groups of "like kind" in word meaning extention, but they differ in their assumption as to the nature of "likeness" for young children. We tested the two proposals by separating and comparing categry membership and perseptual similarity in a word/no-word match-to-sample task. In the first experiment, three age group children, 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds, were shown a standard object and three another pictures : a taxonomically similar object, a thematically simillar object, and a perceptually similar object. They were asked either : "This is a dax ; show me another dax "or" Find the one that goes with this one."After completing the session, in order to comfirm whether children can shift to another dimension of stimuli of the first session, children were asked "Find th … More e another one that goes with this one."There were three main results. First, the three age groups showed a pronaunced shift from thematic-based to perceptual-based responding when novel words were given. Secnd, a developmental shift was found from perceptual responding to taxonomic responding in the presence of a novel word. Third, the ease of a shift to another dimension was depending on aging, 5-year-olds children could shift to another dimension most easily.In the second experiment, we used American version as stimuli, and repeated the same procedure as the experiment I.Most findings of the experiment I were confirmed, but the shape bias function much storong.The third experiment conserns about how children'attension is directed to the taxonomic dimension. We set two traning condition : the group giving information about the function of objects, and the group giving information to attend to the commonalities of objects, and the control group same as the novel lavel condition of Experiment I and Experiment II.The main result was that younger chilren could not attend to the taxonomic dimension without information of the function of objects.These results suggest that perceptual similarity is very important in early acquisition of word meaning, but that children gradually shift their attention to deeper properties. We conjecture that this early focus on perceptual similarity may help young children learn categories, gradually bootstrapping them to a sense oftaxonomic relations that goes beyond perceptual similarity. Less