ABSTRACT

15-month-olds behave as if they comprehend filler-gap dependencies such as wh-questions and relative clauses. On one hypothesis, this success does not reflect adult-like representations but rather a “gap-driven” interpretation heuristic based on verb knowledge. Infants who know that feed is transitive may notice that a predicted direct object is missing in Which monkey did the frog feed __? and then search the display for the animal that got fed. This gap-driven account predicts that 15-month-olds will perform accurately only if they know enough verbs to deploy this interpretation heuristic; therefore, performance should depend on vocabulary. We test this prediction in a preferential looking task and find corroborating evidence: Only 15-month-olds with higher vocabulary behave as if they comprehend wh-questions and relative clauses. This result reproduces the previous finding that 15-month-olds can identify the right answer for wh-questions and relative clauses under certain experimental contexts, and is moreover consistent with the gap-driven heuristic account for this behavior.

摘要

15个月大的孩子表现得好像他们了解填充空白的依赖关系，例如wh问题和相对从句。在一个假设上，这种成功并不反映成年人的表现形式，而是基于动词知识的“差距驱动”解释启发式方法。知道进食是传递性的婴儿可能会注意到青蛙进食哪只猴子的预期直接对象缺失__？然后在显示屏上搜索被喂食的动物。这个由差距驱动的描述预测，只有15个月大的孩子知道足够的动词来运用这种解释启发法时，他们才能准确地表现出来。因此，表现应取决于词汇量。我们测试这一预测在优先注视任务，找到佐证：只有15个月大的婴儿具有较高的词汇表现得好像他们理解WH -questions和相关条款。该结果重现了先前的发现，即15个月大的人可以在某些实验情况下为wh疑问句和相关从句找到正确的答案，而且与这种行为的差距驱动的启发式解释相一致。