知识的发生与儿童早期学习

Origins of Knowledge and Children's Early Learning

在儿童早期认知研究中,知识的发生或初始状态是一个非常重要但又缺乏应有重视的问题。本研究联系乔姆斯基的先天语言机制观点、福多和平克尔的模块说、格尔曼的骨架原则等,对解决这一问题提出了解释,并初步探讨了儿童认知发展和早期学习机制的某些核心问题。从根本上看,“初始状态知识”的实质是人类个体心智从一开始就具备底层的、领域特殊的初始结构、骨架原则或约束,以保证婴幼儿在口语、面部识别、客体永久性、空间记忆、数量关系、工具使用等领域迅速而卓有成效地学习。

For a long time,people have been puzzled by a mysterious question about cognition:why can people acquire so much knowledge based on the limited information they get? Taking language acquisition as an example,infants basically master their mother tongue in a few years when other cognitive abilities are extremely immature,and their second language(L2) learning ability is far higher than that of adults.This is a puzzling problem,which is also called“Plato's problem”by Chomsky and others.Starting from the“Plato's problem”and“negative evidence”,this paper puts forward an explanation to solve the“Plato's problem”by combining Chomsky's view of innate language mechanism,Fodor and Pinker's modular theory,and Gelman's skeletal principle,etc.,and preliminarily discusses some core issues of children's early cognitive development and learning mechanism.Fundamentally speaking,the essence of“Plato's problem”is that the human individual mind has the initial structure or skeletal principle of the primary and special field from the very beginning,so as to ensure that infants can learn quickly and effectively.