Attitude verbs, such as think, want, and know, describe internal mental states that leave few cues as to their meanings in the physical world. Consequently, their acquisition requires learners to draw from indirect evidence stemming from the linguistic and conversational contexts in which they occur. This provides us a unique opportunity to probe the linguistic and cognitive abilities that children deploy in acquiring these words. Through a few case studies, we show how children make use of syntactic and pragmatic cues to figure out attitude verb meanings and how their successes, and even their mistakes, reveal remarkable conceptual, linguistic, and pragmatic sophistication.

中文翻译：

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论态度动词的习得

态度动词，例如think、want 和know，描述了内部的心理状态，这些心理状态几乎没有关于它们在物理世界中的含义的线索。因此，它们的习得需要学习者从它们发生的语言和会话上下文中提取的间接证据中提取。这为我们提供了一个独特的机会来探索儿童在获取这些单词时所运用的语言和认知能力。通过一些案例研究，我们展示了儿童如何利用句法和语用线索来确定态度动词的含义，以及他们的成功，甚至错误如何揭示出非凡的概念、语言和语用复杂性。