ABSTRACT

Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence preferences to describe causal events in English- and Japanese-speaking children (aged three and five years) and compared this to preferences displayed by adults. We studied two factors suggested to influence this choice: Language (Corpus study & Experiment 1) and Intentionality (Experiment 2). Participants watched videos depicting familiar and novel causal actions, and made a best-match choice between a transitive and intransitive description. We found a stronger preference for intransitive sentences with causal verbs and more frequent argument omissions in Japanese child-directed speech than in English child-directed speech. The trajectory of acquisition in the selection of transitive sentences for causal events differed between languages. For intentionality, with familiar verbs both Japanese and English speakers selected fewer transitives for accidental than intentional scenes, but this pattern was more pronounced in Japanese speakers. However, with novel verbs, only five-year-olds and adults showed this preference. These data provide important new information to constrain theories about the process of learning to map event structure to language, and its interdependence with intentionality and the distributional properties of linguistic input to children.

摘要

语言对因果事件的编码方式不同，或多或少强调行动的主体或患者。这些偏好如何出现以及认知偏见和特定语言输入在发展的不同阶段的相对影响知之甚少。在这些研究中，我们调查了描述英语和日语儿童（三岁和五岁）中因果事件的句子偏爱的出现，并将其与成年人表现出来的偏爱进行了比较。我们研究了建议影响该选择的两个因素：语言（Corpus研究和实验1）和意向性（实验2）。参与者观看了描述熟悉且新颖的因果行为的视频，并在可及和不可及的描述之间做出了最佳匹配的选择。我们发现，与英语的儿童指导语音相比，日语的儿童指导语音更倾向于使用带有因果动词的不及物动词，并且更经常地省略议论语。语言之间因果事件的和服句子选择中的习得轨迹有所不同。对于意向性，日语和英语使用者都使用熟悉的动词为偶然的场景选择了较少的及物，而不是故意的场景，但是这种模式在日语使用者中更为明显。但是，对于新颖的动词，只有五岁的成年人和成年人表现出这种偏爱。这些数据提供了重要的新信息，以约束有关将事件结构映射到语言的学习过程及其与意向性和对儿童的语言输入分布特性的相互依存关系的理论。