ABSTRACT

In order for children to understand and reason about the world in an adult-like fashion, they need to learn that conceptual categories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog is also an animal). While children learn from their first-hand observation of the world, social knowledge transmission via language can also play an important role in this learning. Previous studies have documented several cues in parental talk that can help children learn about conceptual hierarchy. However, these studies have used different datasets and methods that have made it difficult to compare the relative usefulness of various linguistic cues to conceptual knowledge and to test whether they scale up to naturalistic speech. Here, we study a large-scale corpus of English child-directed speech – collected in North America and the UK – and used a unified classification-based evaluation method which allowed us to investigate and compare cues that vary in terms of how explicit the information they offer is. We found the more explicit cues to be too sparse or too noisy in child-directed speech, making them unlikely to support robust learning. In contrast, the implicit cues offered a more reliable source of information. Further, we investigated developmental changes from 3 to 6 years of age, and we found no differences in the availability of these cues in the input. Our work confirms the utility of caregiver talk for conveying conceptual information and supporting the development of early taxonomic knowledge. It provides a first step toward a cognitive model that would combine perceptual- and language-based mechanisms, leading to a more comprehensive account of children’s conceptual development.

摘要

为了让孩子们像成人一样理解和推理世界，他们需要学习概念类别是以分层方式组织的（例如，狗也是一种动物）。当孩子们从对世界的第一手观察中学习时，通过语言传播的社会知识也可以在这种学习中发挥重要作用。之前的研究已经记录了父母谈话中的一些线索，可以帮助孩子了解概念层次结构。然而，这些研究使用了不同的数据集和方法，这使得比较各种语言线索对概念知识的相对有用性以及测试它们是否扩展到自然主义语音变得困难。这里，我们研究了在北美和英国收集的大型英语儿童语音语料库，并使用了统一的基于分类的评估方法，该方法使我们能够调查和比较不同线索提供的信息的明确程度是。我们发现，在针对儿童的语音中，更明确的提示太稀疏或太吵闹，使得它们不太可能支持稳健的学习。相比之下，隐含的线索提供了更可靠的信息来源。此外，我们调查了 3 岁至 6 岁的发育变化，发现输入中这些线索的可用性没有差异。我们的工作证实了护理人员谈话在传达概念信息和支持早期分类学知识的发展方面的效用。