ABSTRACT

Early object name learning is often conceptualized as a problem of mapping heard names to referents. However, infants do not hear object names as discrete events but rather in extended interactions organized around goal-directed actions on objects. The present study examined the statistical structure of the nonlinguistic events that surround parent naming of objects. Parents and 12-month-old infants were left alone in a room for 10 minutes with 32 objects available for exploration. Parent and infant handling of objects and parent naming of objects were coded. The four measured statistics were from measures used in the study of coherent discourse: (i) a frequency distribution in which actions were frequently directed to a few objects and more rarely to other objects; (ii) repeated returns to the high-frequency objects over the 10-minute play period; (iii) clustered repetitions and continuity of actions on objects; and (iv) structured networks of transitions among objects in play that connected all the played-with objects. Parent naming was infrequent but related to the statistics of object-directed actions. The implications of the discourse-like stream of actions are discussed in terms of learning mechanisms that could support rapid learning of object names from relatively few name-object co-occurrences.

摘要

早期的物体名称学习通常被概念化为将听到的名称映射到所指对象的问题。然而，婴儿听到的物体名称并不是离散事件，而是围绕物体上的目标导向动作组织的扩展交互。本研究检查了围绕对象的父命名的非语言事件的统计结构。父母和 12 个月大的婴儿被单独留在房间里 10 分钟，并有 32 个物体可供探索。父母和婴儿对物体的处理以及父母对物体的命名都进行了编码。四个测量的统计数据来自连贯话语研究中使用的测量：（i）频率分布，其中动作经常针对少数对象，而很少针对其他对象；(ii) 在 10 分钟的游戏时间内重复返回高频对象；(iii) 对物体的动作的集中重复和连续性；(iv) 游戏中物体之间的结构化过渡网络，连接所有被玩过的物体。父级命名并不常见，但与对象导向操作的统计数据有关。从学习机制的角度讨论了类似话语的动作流的含义，该机制可以支持从相对较少的名称-对象共现中快速学习对象名称。