It is becoming increasingly clear that the way that children acquire cognitive representations depends critically on how their processing system is developing. In particular, recent studies suggest that individual differences in language processing speed play an important role in explaining the speed with which children acquire language. Inconsistencies across studies, however, mean that it is not clear whether this relationship is causal or correlational, whether it is present right across development, or whether it extends beyond word learning to affect other aspects of language learning, like syntax acquisition. To address these issues, the current study used the looking-while-listening paradigm devised by Fernald, Swingley, and Pinto (2001) to test the speed with which a large longitudinal cohort of children (the Language 0-5 Project) processed language at 19, 25, and 31 months of age, and took multiple measures of vocabulary (UK-CDI, Lincoln CDI, CDI-III) and syntax (Lincoln CDI) between 8 and 37 months of age. Processing speed correlated with vocabulary size - though this relationship changed over time, and was observed only when there was variation in how well the items used in the looking-while-listening task were known. Fast processing speed was a positive predictor of subsequent vocabulary growth, but only for children with smaller vocabularies. Faster processing speed did, however, predict faster syntactic growth across the whole sample, even when controlling for concurrent vocabulary. The results indicate a relatively direct relationship between processing speed and syntactic development, but point to a more complex interaction between processing speed, vocabulary size and subsequent vocabulary growth.

中文翻译：

---

处理速度或词汇量是否可以预测幼儿以后的语言发展？

越来越清楚的是，儿童获得认知表征的方式在很大程度上取决于他们的处理系统的发展方式。特别是，最近的研究表明，语言处理速度的个体差异在解释儿童获得语言的速度方面起着重要作用。然而，研究之间的不一致意味着这种关系是因果关系还是相关关系尚不清楚，它是否在整个发展过程中都存在，或者它是否超出单词学习范围影响语言学习的其他方面，如句法习得。为了解决这些问题，当前的研究使用了 Fernald、Swingley、和 Pinto (2001) 测试了大量纵向队列儿童（语言 0-5 项目）在 19、25 和 31 个月大时处理语言的速度，并采用多种词汇量度（UK-CDI、Lincoln CDI、CDI-III) 和语法 (Lincoln CDI) 年龄在 8 至 37 个月之间。处理速度与词汇量相关——尽管这种关系会随着时间的推移而改变，并且只有在边听边看任务中使用的项目有多好已知时才会观察到。快速的处理速度是后续词汇量增长的积极预测因素，但仅适用于词汇量较小的儿童。然而，更快的处理速度确实预测了整个样本中更快的句法增长，即使在控制并发词汇时也是如此。