关键词: 汉语动词, 身体部位, 两岁儿童, 词汇理解, 眼动追踪

Abstract: Though Chinese-speaking children could understand and speak many verbs before three years old, few studies examined how young children process these verbs. Previous studies found that early-learned verbs were associated with specific body regions in both English (Maouene, Hidaka, & Smith, 2008) and Mandarin Chinese (Chen & Zhu, 2014) native speakers, yet whether children could utilize body part information to speed up spoken verb comprehension remains unclear. In the present study, whether semantic factor (i.e., body part information) and learning factor (i.e., age) influenced young childrens' and adults' verb comprehension was investigated using the looking-while-listening procedure. A total of 32 two-year-olds and 32 adults participated in a verb comprehension task using a looking-while-listening procedure and eye tracking approach. Eleven additional children were excluded due to not passing drift correction (4 children), losing more than 50% of eye tracking trials (4 children), unwilling to stick marker on their forehead (1 child), experimenter error (1 child), and fussiness (1 child). After the experiment, all children got some stickers as presents, and all adult participants received a small amount of cash as a reward. A 2×2 mixed design was used, two independent variables were: 1) semantic distracters (same body region, different body regions; within subjects); 2) age groups (children, adults; between subjects). The dependent variables were the ratio of looking at the target side and the looking time of the target side. The results showed that the main effects of the body part consistency (i.e., semantic distracters) and age group were both significant. The analysis of the looking time ratio to the target side showed that the adults could comprehend action pictures better than children. The adults group could utilize multiple clues, including target onset and semantic cues (i.e., inconsistency of body regions), to recognize target verbs swiftly under both conditions; while the two-year-olds could only use both cues only under the different body regions condition. Moreover, the time course analysis showed a significant effect of body part consistency at 200~650 ms time-window in adults and at 300~1800 ms time-window in two-year-olds in the verb comprehension task. As a whole, through the use of looking-while-listening procedure and eye movement tracking, this study found that: (1) both two-year-old children and adults could use body part information to understand oral verbs, and adults respond faster than children; (2) In the inconsistent condition, two-year-old children could use the onset information of word pronunciation to quickly infer vocabulary semantics, while adults could do so under both conditions. The results provide an empirical basis for revealing the processing of Chinese verbs by young children and adults. More specifically, since both adults and children as young as two-year-old could use body part information to speed up oral verb comprehension, it suggests that body part information is an important part of verb semantic lexicon from a young age. However, adults are more proficient native speakers who could comprehend verbs faster than young children, while young children are less skillful in this process.