ABSTRACT

Despite the seemingly simple mapping between adjectives and perceptual properties (e.g., color, texture), preschool children have difficulty establishing the appropriate extension of novel adjectives. When children hear a novel adjective applied to an individual object, they successfully extend the adjective to other members of the same object category but have difficulty extending it more broadly to members of different categories. We propose that the source of this difficulty lies at the interface of the linguistic and conceptual systems: children initially limit the extension of an adjective to the category of the object on which it was introduced. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated whether participants construed images as “pictures of things” (objects) or “blobs of stuff” (non-objects). For both 36-month-old children (Experiments 1 and 2) and adults (Experiment 3), the conceptual status of an image influenced how they extended an adjective applied to that image. Children extended novel adjectives more successfully when they construed the images as non-objects than when they construed the same images as objects. Similarly, adults were faster to make adjective extensions when construing the images as non-objects rather than objects. Learners of all ages must navigate this linguistic-conceptual interface in assessing whether and how novel adjectives should be extended to new individuals.

摘要

尽管形容词和感知特性（例如颜色、质地）之间的映射看似简单，但学龄前儿童仍难以确定新形容词的适当扩展。当孩子们听到一个新的形容词应用于单个对象时，他们成功地将形容词扩展到同一对象类别的其他成员，但难以将其更广泛地扩展到不同类别的成员。我们认为这个困难的根源在于语言系统和概念系统的接口：儿童最初将形容词的扩展限制为引入它的对象的类别。为了验证这一假设，我们操纵了参与者将图像解释为“事物的图片”（物体）还是“物体的斑点”（非物体）。对于 36 个月大的儿童（实验 1 和 2）和成人（实验 3），图像的概念状态影响了他们如何扩展应用于该图像的形容词。当儿童将图像解释为非对象时，比将相同的图像解释为对象时，他们更成功地扩展了新颖的形容词。同样，当将图像解释为非对象而不是对象时，成年人会更快地进行形容词扩展。所有年龄段的学习者都必须在这个语言概念界面中导航，以评估是否以及如何将新颖的形容词扩展到新的个体。当儿童将图像解释为非对象时，比将相同的图像解释为对象时，他们更成功地扩展了新颖的形容词。同样，当将图像解释为非对象而不是对象时，成年人会更快地进行形容词扩展。所有年龄段的学习者都必须在这个语言概念界面中导航，以评估是否以及如何将新颖的形容词扩展到新的个体。当儿童将图像解释为非对象时，比将相同的图像解释为对象时，他们更成功地扩展了新颖的形容词。同样，当将图像解释为非对象而不是对象时，成年人会更快地进行形容词扩展。所有年龄段的学习者都必须在这个语言概念界面中导航，以评估是否以及如何将新颖的形容词扩展到新的个体。