题名

華語幼兒之新詞學習與表達性詞彙的關係

并列篇名

Relationship between Fast Mapping, Retention, and Expressive Vocabulary in Mandarin-Speaking Toddlers

DOI

10.6251/BEP.202206_53(4).0002

作者

賴沛雨(Pei-Yu Lai);劉惠美(Hui-Mei Liu)

关键词

詞彙庫 ; 保留學習 ; 快速配對 ; 早期詞彙學習 ; 華語幼兒 ; lexicon ; retention ; fast mapping ; early vocabulary acquisition ; Mandarin-speaking toddlers

期刊名称

教育心理學報

卷期/出版年月

53卷4期(2022 / 06 / 01)

页次

801 - 825

内容语文

繁體中文

中文摘要

嬰幼兒早期的詞彙發展能預測未來的語言和閱讀發展,文獻指出新詞學習能力是2∼3歲詞彙快速增長的重要機制之一。「快速配對」是幼兒初聽到一個詞彙時,將名稱與物件或動作之語意特徵形成連結,「保留」則是將初始連結整合到已知詞彙的歷程。有研究發現因心理及語言特性不同,動詞習得較名詞困難,此外,華語幼兒早期詞彙庫因較英語系語言有較高的動詞比例、且具論元省略等特性,因此新詞學習表現也可能有所差異。本研究目的在瞭解華語幼兒新詞學習機制以及其與早期詞彙庫之關聯性,以40位平均生理月齡37個月之一般發展幼兒為對象,以華語嬰幼兒溝通發展量表(臺灣版)、自編名詞與動詞之新詞學習作業來檢視其詞彙庫及新詞學習能力的發展,並探討兩者的關聯性。結果發現此階段幼兒的詞類組成以名詞最多、謂詞次之、封閉詞最少。新詞學習則發現此階段幼兒已發展動詞與名詞快速配對能力,但詞彙保留的表現明顯較差,且動詞表徵保留及整合較名詞來得困難。相關分析顯示僅動詞學習能力與詞彙量呈現中高度正相關性且兩者能彼此預測,顯示動詞學習能力較好的華語幼兒其詞彙庫較大,擁有較多詞彙的幼兒也能利用既有詞彙庫來擴增更多新詞,顯示動詞學習對於華語幼兒詞彙發展的重要性。

英文摘要

Vocabulary development is an ongoing process that begins in early infancy and continues into early adulthood. Moreover, early word-learning abilities are strongly related to later literacy performance. Fast mapping (FM) is a critical word-learning mechanism for early vocabulary growth in 2-3-year-old toddlers. Aside from FM, retention is another crucial ability that enables children to retain and integrate a novel word into their lexicon. In the past, word-learning studies focused on how children learn a noun and were mostly based on English acquisition. According to the literature, word class can influence how children learn a new word; for example, among toddlers, learning the word for a novel action is more difficult than learning the word for an object, implying that learning verbs is harder than learning nouns. Some research has explained that many concrete nouns refer to naturally discrete referents. By contrast, even verbs with fairly concrete meanings (such as motion verbs) are more ambiguous than nouns. Owing to the high-frequency input of verbs and their salient position in a sentence, Mandarin is considered a verb-prominent language. Researchers have also discovered that Mandarin-speaking toddlers have a higher ratio of verbs in their lexicon compared with similarly aged speakers of other languages. In the current study, we investigated (1) the scope and composition of toddlers' lexicons; (2) the word-learning performance (FM, Retention, and Production) of 25-45-month-old Mandarin-speaking toddlers; (3) how word class affects toddlers' performance in learning new words; and (4) the relationships between toddlers' intrinsic word-learning abilities and their extrinsic lexicon. This study recruited 40 developmentally typical Taiwanese toddlers who met the following criteria: (1) first language was Mandarin and (2) were not developmentally delayed or physically or mentally impaired. The average participant age was 37 months (standard deviation [SD] = 5.15). We used a standardized assessment, namely the Mandarin Chinese Communicative Development Inventory, Taiwan version, to assess the word composition and lexicon of individual Mandarin-speaking toddlers participating in the present study. We used a self-designed word-learning task adapted from referent selection design (Horst et al., 2010; Lu & Tsao, 2014), which included three phases, FM, retention, and production. Two versions of the task were designed-noun and verb-to investigate whether nouns are easier to learn than verbs when both word types are presented in comparable sentence contexts, controlling for the number of exposures. Each version of the task included four familiar and four novel words to examine how novelty affects word-learning. The procedure began with the noun condition and after a 10-min break, proceeded to the verb condition. Each condition contained a learning event, FM, production, and retention phase. During the learning event phase, a laptop was employed to present toddlers with the referent picture. Three prerecorded instruction sentences were played; for instance, "zhe shi (this is) 'referent object'," "you yi ge (there is one) 'referent object'," and "'referent object' zai zhe li (is here)!" These three sentences are all examples of common phrases used in daily conversational Mandarin. After three exposures to the word, the study transitioned to the FM phase in which three pictures (including a correct referent object's picture) were presented on the laptop and the examiner asked the toddler, "In the three pictures, which one is the 'referent object'?" In the production phase, the referent object's picture was presented, and the examiner asked, "What is this?" to encourage the toddler to say the novel word without prompting. After a 5-min break, without any recap or practice of the word, the Retention phase began. In this phase, three pictures were presented to the toddler, and the examiner asked, "In the three pictures, which one is the 'referent object'?" The same procedure was applied when verbs were used, but a 20-s prerecorded referent action film was presented in the learning event phase, and referent action GIFs were presented in the FM, production, and retention phases. The number and sequences of the presented stimulus in the aforementioned phases were well-controlled. Descriptive statistics, including percentages and means, one-way repeated-measure ANOVA, and statistical significance tests were used to analyze the data. In addition, Pearson's correlation and linear regression were respectively used to examine the relationship and these variables' predictability of each other. We determined that the average lexicon size for Mandarin-speaking toddlers was 536.67 words [SD = 128.05], and on average, nouns accounted for 50% [SD = .24], verbs and adjectives accounted for 25% [SD = .02], and close words accounted for 9% [SD = .02] of their lexicon. Our results are consistent with the literature showing that Mandarin-speaking toddlers exhibit "noun bias" in their early lexicon (Chen & Liu, 2014). Second, in the word-learning task, we found that Mandarin-speaking toddlers at this stage have well-developed noun and verb FM abilities. Their accuracies for novel word-learning, both nouns and verbs, exceeded 80%. However, they demonstrated little ability in the retention (noun acc = .64, SD = .25; verb acc = .44, SD = .3) and production phases (noun acc = .09, SD = .12; verb acc = .08, SD = .21). These findings indicate that 2-4-year-old Mandarin-speaking toddlers can successfully map a novel word onto a referent object or action but fail at retaining novel words after a 5-min retention phase. Additionally, we determined that the learning performance for verbs in the retention phrase was significantly worse than that for nouns [F(1, 38) = 16.97, p < .001, η^2= .31]. These results indicate that FM and retention can be seen as two different mechanisms in word-learning and also suggest that learning a verb or action is more difficult than learning a noun or object, which is consistent with the literature. Finally, there was a medium positive correlation between verb learning and toddlers' lexicon in both the FM (r = .482- .564, ps < .01) and retention (r = .336- .485, ps < .05) phases, which was not seen during the noun learning task. Moreover, individuals' verb learning ability was a significant predictor of lexicon size (r^2 = .28, p < .001), and lexicon size could also predict verb learning ability (r^2 = .28, p < .001). This suggests that toddlers' verb learning ability and their lexicon have bidirectional predictive power, meaning that toddlers who have larger lexicons demonstrate better verb learning ability and those who have better verb learning ability also tend to learn more new words. Under daily word-learning conditions, verbs usually appear with other words (e.g., known words or pronouns) in a sentence. For instance, when a novel verb appears in a structural argument with other types of words, "syntactic bootstrapping" can facilitate verb learning. In summary, our findings indicate that 2-4-year-old Mandarin-speaking toddlers have well-developed FM ability for both nouns and verbs but only a small proportion can retain the newly-learned words. Retaining and integrating a verb's (action) representation into the lexicon can be more challenging than doing so with a noun (object). We conclude that in the early vocabulary learning stage, toddlers who can utilize verbs or have a large verb vocabulary at their command are privileged in word-learning and that verb learning ability plays a crucial role in early vocabulary development for Mandarin-speaking toddlers. It would be beneficial to integrate the assessment of novel word-learning processes of individuals with typical and atypical development into the evaluation of early language development and disorders.

主题分类 社會科學 > 心理學
社會科學 > 教育學
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