New Insights Into Old Puzzles From Infants' Categorical Discrimination of Soundless Phonetic Units
New Insights Into Old Puzzles From Infants' Categorical Discrimination of Soundless Phonetic Units
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DOI：
10.1207/s15473341lld0203_1
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发表时间：
2006-01-01
影响因子：
1.5
通讯作者：
Petitto, Laura-Ann
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Baker, Stephanie;Golinkoff, Roberta;Petitto, Laura-Ann
在40年中，严格的科学辩论一直存在着婴儿检测和分类语音单位的显着能力是否来自语言特定的机制，或者这种能力是否是由一般感知机制发展出来的。这一争议的核心围绕着年轻的人脑是否专门检测语言中的基本对比模式，或者它是否仅仅处理声音的一般听觉感知特征，随着时间的流逝，它们被用于语言学习。本文通过使用自然签名语言的无声语音单元作为一种新的研究工具来探讨这个问题。研究发现，4个月大的听力婴儿根据语言类别的成员身份将无声音的语音单元分类，而14个月大的婴儿未能做到这一点，表现出相同的初始能力和婴儿分类本地歧视的经典发展的能力和语音中的非本地语言语音单元。这些结果表明了一个新颖的可检验假设：婴儿可以从具有与自然语言组织独有的交替对比度检测特定图案单元的能力开始生命，并根据语言类别的成员身份对其进行分类。
For 4 decades, serious scientific debate has persisted as to whether infants' remarkable capacity to detect and categorize phonetic units is derived from language-specific mechanisms or whether this capacity develops out of general perceptual mechanisms. The heart of this controversy has revolved around whether the young human brain is specialized to detect the underlying contrasting patterns in language or whether it simply processes general auditory perceptual features of sound that, over time, become utilized for language learning. This article takes a novel look at this question by using soundless phonetic units from a natural signed language as a new research tool. Research finds that 4-month-old hearing infants categorize soundless phonetic units on the basis of linguistic category membership, whereas 14-month-old infants fail to do so-thereby exhibiting the identical initial capacity and classic developmental shift in infant categorical discrimination of native and nonnative (foreign language) phonetic units in speech. These results suggest a novel testable hypothesis: Infants may begin life with the capacity to detect specific patterned units with alternating contrasts unique to natural language organization and to categorize them on the basis of linguistic category membership.