| Title | English- and Mandarin-Learning Infants' Discrimination of Actions and Objects in Dynamic Events |
| Authors | Chen, Jie Tardif, Twila Pulverman, Rachel Casasola, Marianella Zhu, Liqi Zheng, Xiaobei Meng, Xiangzhi |
| Affiliation | Univ Michigan, Dept Psychol, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA. Delaware State Univ, Dept Psychol, Dover, DE USA. Cornell Univ, Dept Human Dev, Ithaca, NY 14853 USA. Chinese Acad Sci, Inst Psychol, Beijing 100864, Peoples R China. Peking Univ, Dept Psychol, Beijing, Peoples R China. Univ Michigan, Dept Psychol, 1012 East Hall,530 Church St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA. |
| Keywords | attention word learning objects and actions English Mandarin EARLY VOCABULARIES LINGUISTIC LABELS NOUN BIAS WORDS VERBS CHILDREN CATEGORIZATION ATTENTION CHINESE INPUT |
| Issue Date | 2015 |
| Publisher | DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY |
| Citation | DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY.2015,51,(10),1501-1515. |
| Abstract | The present studies examined the role of linguistic experience in directing English and Mandarin learners' attention to aspects of a visual scene. Specifically, they asked whether young language learners in these 2 cultures attend to differential aspects of a word-learning situation. Two groups of English and Mandarin learners, 6-8-month-olds (n = 65) and 17-19-month-olds (n = 91), participated in 2 studies, based on a habituation paradigm, designed to test infants' discrimination between actions and objects in dynamic events. In Study 1, these stimuli were presented in silence, whereas in Study 2, a verbal label accompanied videos. Results showed that 6-8-month-olds could discriminate action changes but not object changes, whereas 17-19-month-olds could discriminate both types of changes. However, there were only very subtle cross-linguistic differences in these patterns when the scenes were presented together with a verbal label. These findings show strong evidence for universal developmental trends in attention, with somewhat weaker evidence that the differences in the types of words Mandarin-versus English-learning children produce or are exposed to affect attention to different aspects of a scene in the first 2 years of life. |
| URI | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11897/418338 |
| ISSN | 0012-1649 |
| DOI | 10.1037/a0039474 |
| Indexed | PubMed SSCI |
| Appears in Collections: | 心理与认知科学学院 |
