ABSTRACT

Linguistic contexts provide useful information about verb meanings by narrowing the space of candidate concepts. Intuitively, the more information, the better. For example, “the tall girl is fezzing,” as compared to “the girl is fezzing,” provides more information about which event, out of multiple candidate events, is being labeled; thus, we may expect it to better facilitate verb learning. However, we find evidence to the contrary: in a verb learning study, preschoolers (N = 60, mean age = 38 months) only performed above chance when the subject was an unmodified determiner phase, but not when it was modified (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 replicated this pattern with a different set of stimuli and a wider age range (N = 60, mean age = 45 months). Further, in Experiment 2, we looked at both learning outcomes—by evaluating pointing responses at Test, and also the learning process—by tracking eye gaze during Familiarization. The results suggest that children’s limited processing abilities are to blame for poor learning outcomes, but that a nuanced understanding of how processing affects learning is required.

摘要

语言环境通过缩小候选概念的空间来提供有关动词含义的有用信息。凭直觉，信息越多越好。例如，“高个子女孩在玩”，而“那个女孩在玩”ing”，提供有关多个候选事件中哪个事件被标记的更多信息；因此，我们希望它可以更好地促进动词学习。但是，我们发现有相反的证据：在动词学习研究中，学龄前儿童（N = 60，平均年龄= 38个月）仅在受试者是未修改的确定者阶段时才表现出高于偶然的机会，而在经过修改时则没有机会（实验1） 。实验2用一组不同的刺激和较宽的年龄范围（N = 60，平均年龄= 45个月）复制了这种模式。此外，在实验2中，我们通过跟踪“熟悉”期间的视线来观察学习结果（通过评估“测试”中的指向响应）和学习过程。结果表明，儿童学习能力差的原因是学习效果差，