Unitization, categorization, and lexicalization of action events in young children

这项研究调查了儿童如何将动作事件解析为元素，并将每个元素映射到不同类型的单词（例如，名词，动词，形容词），以及他们如何概括新学到的单词。进行了三个系列的实验。在第一个系列中，我们向他们展示了新奇的名词或动词，同时让他们观看由演员、动作和受动对象组成的动作事件。然后我们测试两个测试事件：对象相同操作更改（OS）事件和操作相同对象更改（AS）事件。我们发现，幼儿很容易将新名词映射和概括为OS事件，但很难将新动词映射和概括为AS事件。在第二个系列的研究中，我们考察了运动事件的两个重要语义成分——路径和方式——哪一个会被合并到动词意义中。日语和说英语的孩子一开始都认为新动词指的是路径而不是方式，但随着发展，他们对自己语言中的分布模式变得敏感。在英语中，表示方式的动词比表示路径的动词要常见得多，英语学龄前儿童和成人主要是在方式的基础上泛化新动词。相比之下，日本的学龄前儿童和成年人没有表现出方式偏见或路径偏见。在第三个系列中，我们调查了日本2岁、3岁和5岁的孩子如何利用论点结构来推断新动词的意义。

This research investigated how children parse action events into elements and map each element to different type of words (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives), and how they generalize the newly learned words. Three series of experiments were conducted. In the first series, we presented novel nouns or verbs while they were watching action events consisting of an actor, an action, and a patient object. We then test two test events : the Object-Same-Action-Change (OS) event and Action-Same-Object-Change (AS) event. We found that young children easily map and generalize novel nouns to the OS event but had severe difficulty to map and generalize novel verbs to the AS event. In the second series of studies, we examined which of the two important semantic components of motion events-Path and Manner-would be incorporated in the verb meaning. Japanese and English-speaking children both started out with an assumption that novel verbs refer to Path rather than Manner, but with development, they become sensitive to the distributional pattern in their own language. In English, verbs referring to Manner are much more common than verbs referring to Path, and English-speaking preschool-age children and adults predominantly generalized novel verbs on the basis of Manner. In contrast, Japanese preschoolers and adults did not show either Manner bias or Path bias. In the third series, we investigated how Japanese 2,3, and 5-year-olds utilize argument structure in inferring the meaning of novel verbs.