台灣以中文為母語的小孩的誘發過度泛化現象

Abstract

本篇研究的目的是要去比較中文跟英文小孩的誘發過度泛化現象的不同之處。誘發過度泛化現象指的是小孩子因為受到之前誘發過的字的影響進而造成對物品過度泛化現象的情況而稱之。Gershkoff-Stowe et al. (2006) 認為Dell (1986) 提出的擴散激活機制 (spreading activation mechanisms) 可用來解釋小孩的三種泛化錯誤類型: 類別錯誤 (category errors) 、語用錯誤 (pragmatic errors) 跟提取錯誤 (retrieval errors)，此三種泛化錯誤的基底機制應該都是同樣的。另外，他們也認為最近激活跟形狀的類似對小孩的命名應該都扮演了很重要的角色。年紀較大的小孩也應該會擁有比較成熟的心理詞彙所以會比起年紀較小的小孩比較不容易受到之前提取過的字的影響。因為中文跟英文心理詞彙的不同，我們想去檢視是否一樣的理論也可套用在中文小孩身上。實驗方法沿用了Gershkoff-Stowe et al. (2006)的相同實驗法，做了與他相同的兩個實驗。第一個實驗是熟悉物與不熟悉物的命名，兩歲小孩要做六次的試驗，然後我們是用三張圖片做為誘發圖片，然後請小孩去命名一個真實的物品。第二個實驗是虛構物品命名，我們在這個實驗裡比較兩歲小孩跟四歲小孩的不同表現。實驗過程跟實驗一是一樣的，只是實驗二是看虛構物品不是真實物品，且有八個試驗機會而不是六個。結果顯示有一個跟英文大致上類似的結果。然而我們仍有發現一些不同之處。第一，我們發現熟悉物在中文裡比起英文似乎有更強的力量。第二個則是兩個語言不同的構詞法可能會對於比較成熟的心理詞彙造成不一樣的誘發方式。

This purpose of this study is to compare the difference of priming overextension phenomena between Mandarin Chinese children and English children. Priming overextension means that children overextend some words due to the effects of the previously primed words. Gershkoff-Stowe et al. (2006) found that spreading activation mechanisms (Dell, 1986) should be the underlying mechanisms of three types of children’s overextension errors, i.e., category errors, pragmatic errors, and retrieval errors. Moreover, they thought that recent activation and perceptual similarity both play an important role on children’s object naming. Besides, older children should have a more mature mental lexicon and thus less susceptible to previously retrieved words than younger children. Due to the difference of the lexicon networks between Mandarin Chinese and English, we want to examine whether the same theory also could apply to Mandarin children. Two experiments which followed Gershkoff-Stowe et al. (2006) were conducted. The first one was familiar or unfamiliar object naming. 2-year-old Children underwent six trials and were primed by three pictures and then were asked to name a real object. The second experiment was novel object naming. We compared the performances of children aged 2 and aged 4 together. The procedure was the same as the experiment 1 despite the fact that children in experiment 2 named novel objects rather than real ones and they underwent 8 trials rather than six. And results showed a generally similar finding with English. However, there are still something different between these two languages. First, we found that familiar objects should have stronger strengths in Mandarin than in English. Second, different morphology in two languages may result in different priming way for more mature mental lexicons.