要了解人类学习一种语言的各种术语背后的概念中所涉及的认知发展过程的秘密，将利用不同大小的圆柱形容器所做的一个实验作为起点似乎不很合适，但它毕竟是一个起点。该实验表明，来自一个讲韩语环境中的5个月大的婴儿，把由运动到接触的一个动作连续体（即那些圆柱形容器的运动）分成两个类别，即“紧”和 “松”。这个概念区分是韩语的构成部分，但不是英语的构成部分。来自一个讲英语环境中一组5个月大的婴儿也做了这种区分，但讲英语的成年人一般不做这种区分。在没有语言支持时，做这种区分的天生本领似乎消失了。所以语言学习似乎涉及将语言形式与事先存在的对声音和意义的表述联系起来。
Nature 430, 453 - 456 (22 July 2004); doi:10.1038/nature02634
Conceptual precursors to language
Because human languages vary in sound and meaning, children must learn which distinctions their language uses. For speech perception, this learning is selective: initially infants are sensitive to most acoustic distinctions used in any language, and this sensitivity reflects basic properties of the auditory system rather than mechanisms specific to language; however, infants' sensitivity to non-native sound distinctions declines over the course of the first year. Here we ask whether a similar process governs learning of word meanings. We investigated the sensitivity of 5-month-old infants in an English-speaking environment to a conceptual distinction that is marked in Korean but not English; that is, the distinction between 'tight' and 'loose' fit of one object to another. Like adult Korean speakers but unlike adult English speakers, these infants detected this distinction and divided a continuum of motion-into-contact actions into tight- and loose-fit categories. Infants' sensitivity to this distinction is linked to representations of object mechanics that are shared by non-human animals. Language learning therefore seems to develop by linking linguistic forms to universal, pre-existing representations of sound and meaning.
Figure 2 Infants use the tight–loose distinction in predicting object motion. a, Test events in experiment 3. b, Test trial looking times in experiment 3. Preference for the unnatural motions was significant, both overall and in each condition (each F1,15 > 4.5, P < 0.05). Looking preferences in each test condition differed reliably from those of control conditions presenting the events of the test trials without exposure to the containment events. Error bars represent standard error.
