汉语婴儿词汇学习的注意偏好

婴儿的动、名词词类学习存在跨文化差异,但是很少研究从注意偏好角度解释这类差异。本研究利用习惯化范式考察汉语婴儿在6-8个月和17-19个月时对事件中人物,动作和物体的区分。结果发现,6-8个月的婴儿仅能区分动作变化,对人物和物体无法区分,而17-19个月的婴儿对三类变化均可以区分。本研究提供了婴儿早期注意偏好发展的实验依据,同时为儿童早期单词获得提供了新的理论基础。     

Action naming in anomic aphasic speakers: effects of instrumentality and name relation

Many studies reveal effects of verb type on verb retrieval, mainly in agrammatic aphasic speakers. In the current study, two factors that might play a role in action naming in anomic aphasic speakers were considered: the conceptual factor instrumentality and the lexical factor name relation to a noun. Instrumental verbs were shown to be better preserved than non-instrumental verbs in a group of anomic aphasic speakers but not in a group of Broca's aphasic speakers. Name relation to a noun improved the performance of the anomic aphasic speakers as well. Again, no effect was found in the group of Broca's aphasic speakers. Verbs with a name relation to a noun were better retrieved in action naming than verbs without a name relation. These findings are discussed in terms of the spreading activation theory of Dell. (Dell, G. S. (1986). A spreading activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological Review 93, 283-321.).     

Assignment of reference to reflexives and pronouns in picture noun phrases: evidence from eye movements

Most structural Binding Theories predict a complementary distribution between reflexives and pronouns in picture noun phrases containing possessors (e.g. "Ken's picture of himself/him"). In two head-mounted eye-tracking experiments, listeners frequently violated Binding Theory predictions for reflexives, often interpreting the reflexives as taking an antecedent outside of the binding domain, and violating complementarity assumptions. Moreover, the pattern and timing of the eye movements showed Binding Theory violations for reflexives during the earliest moments of reference resolution. The results demonstrate that either binding constraints must be reformulated to decouple pronouns and reflexives or all reflexives in picture noun phrases must be treated as logophors, and thus exempt from structural Binding Theory.     

Processing reflexives and pronouns in picture noun phrase

Binding theory (e.g., Chomsky, 1981) has played a central role in both syntactic theory and models of language processing. Its constraints are designed to predict that the referential domains of pronouns and reflexives are nonoverlapping, that is, are complementary; these constraints are also thought to play a role in online reference resolution. The predictions of binding theory and its role in sentence processing were tested in four experiments that monitored participants' eye movements as they followed spoken instructions to have a doll touch a picture belonging to another doll. The instructions used pronouns and reflexives embedded in picture noun phrases (PNPs) containing possessor phrases (e.g., Pick up Ken. Have Ken touch Harry's picture of himself). Although the interpretations assigned to pronouns were generally consistent with binding theory, reflexives were frequently assigned interpretations that violated binding theory. In addition, the timing and pattern of eye movements were inconsistent with models of language processing that assume that binding theory acts as an early filter to restrict the referential domain. The interpretations assigned to reflexives in PNPs with possessors suggest that they are binding-theory-exempt logophors, a conclusion that unifies the treatment of reflexives in PNPs.     

Processing grammatical gender of role nouns: Further evidence from eye movements

Two eye-tracking experiments investigated the effects of masculine versus feminine grammatical gender on the processing of role nouns and on establishing coreference relations. Participants read sentences with the basic structure My <kinship term> is a <role noun> <prepositional phrase > such as My brother is a singer in a band. Role nouns were either masculine or feminine. Kinship terms were lexically male or female and in this way specified referent gender, i.e., the sex of the person referred to. Experiment 1 tested a fully crossed design including items with an incorrect combination of lexically male kinship term and feminine role name. Experiment 2 tested only correct combinations of grammatical and lexical/referential gender to control for possible effects of the incorrect items of Experiment 1. In early stages of processing, feminine role nouns, but not masculine ones, were fixated longer when grammatical and referential gender were contradictory (Bruder _male–Sängerin _fem/brother–[female] singer). In later stages of sentence wrap-up there were longer fixations for sentences with masculine than for those with feminine role nouns. Results of both experiments indicate that, for feminine role nouns, cues to referent gender are integrated immediately, whereas a late integration obtains for masculine forms.     

Vocabulary and automatic attention: The relation between novel words and gaze dynamics in noun generalization

Words direct visual attention in infants, children, and adults, presumably by activating representations of referents that then direct attention to matching stimuli in the visual scene. Novel, unknown, words have also been shown to direct attention, likely via the activation of more general representations of naming events. To examine the critical issue of how novel words and visual attention interact to support word learning we coded frame-by-frame the gaze of 17- to 31-month-old children (n = 66, 38 females) while generalizing novel nouns. We replicate prior findings of more attention to shape when generalizing novel nouns, and a relation to vocabulary development. However, we also find that following a naming event, children who produce fewer nouns take longer to look at the objects they eventually select and make more transitions between objects before making a generalization decision. Children who produce more nouns look to the objects they eventually select more quickly following the naming event and make fewer looking transitions. We discuss these findings in the context of prior proposals regarding children's few-shot category learning, and a developmental cascade of multiple perceptual, cognitive, and word-learning processes that may operate in cases of both typical development and language delay.

Research Highlights

• Examined how novel words guide visual attention by coding frame-by-frame where children look when asked to generalize novel names.
• Gaze patterns differed with vocabulary size: children with smaller vocabularies attended to generalization targets more slowly and did more comparison than those with larger vocabularies.
• Demonstrates a relationship between vocabulary size and attention to object properties during naming.
• This work has implications for looking-based tests of early cognition, and our understanding of children's few-shot category learning.