Influences of vowel and tone variation on emergent word knowledge: a cross-linguistic investigation
Influences of vowel and tone variation on emergent word knowledge: a cross-linguistic investigation
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DOI：
10.1111/desc.12097
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发表时间：
2014-01-01
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Singh, Leher;Hui, Tam Jun;Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick
为了学习单词，婴儿必须对母语的语音对比敏感。在人类语言中，声调是音位对比的主要来源，但是关于声调对词汇学习的影响的研究却很少。本研究调查了两组婴儿对声调发音错误的敏感性。汉语学习者的声调在本族语中是音位的，而英语学习者的声调是非音位的，构成了超音段变异。在实验一中，英语学习者接受了新的词-宾语配对的训练，并在18个月和24个月时测试了他们对这些词的正确发音，音调和元音错误发音的识别。在实验2a中，以相同年龄段的英汉双语学习者为被试，完成了一项类似的任务。结果表明，非声调学习者在18个月时将声调和元音替换视为发音错误，但在24个月时仅将元音替换视为发音错误。声调学习者在两个年龄段都把声调和元音的替代当作发音错误。在实验2b中，双语非声调语言学习者被测试在相同的一组任务复制一组类似的结果作为单语非声调语言学习者（实验1）。研究结果表明，在18个月的早期倾向，把语气作为一个词的定义特征，无论其词汇相关性。在18 - 24个月之间，学习者似乎以语言特有的方式将词汇相关性归因于声调。目前的研究确定了声调变化对新学到的单词记忆的影响，以及词汇声调-人类语言的一个高度频繁的组成部分-实际上成为早期学习者词汇的时间段。调查结果的背景下与流行的发展中的词汇模型。
To learn words, infants must be sensitive to native phonological contrast. While lexical tone predominates as a source of phonemic contrast in human languages, there has been little investigation of the influences of lexical tone on word learning. The present study investigates infants' sensitivity to tone mispronunciations in two groups of infants. For one group (Chinese learners), tone is phonemic in their native language, and for the second group (English learners), tone is non-phonemic and constituted suprasegmental variation. In Experiment 1, English learners were trained on novel word-object pairings and tested on their recognition of correct pronunciations, tone and vowel mispronunciations of these words at 18 and 24months. In Experiment 2a, bilingual English-Chinese learners were tested on a similar task translated into Chinese at the same age intervals. Results demonstrate that non-tonal learners treated tonal and vowel substitutions alike as mispronunciations at 18months but only treated vowel substitutions as mispronunciations at 24months. Tonal learners treated both tonal and vowel substitutions as mispronunciations at both ages. In Experiment 2b, bilingual non-tone language learners were tested on the same set of tasks replicating a similar set of results as monolingual non-tone language learners (Experiment 1). Findings point to an early predisposition to treat tone as a defining characteristic of words regardless of its lexical relevance at 18months. Between 18 and 24months, learners appear to ascribe lexical relevance to tone in a language-specific manner. The current study identifies the influences of tone variation on memories for newly learned words and the time period during which lexical tone - a highly frequent constituent of human languages - actually becomes lexical for early learners. Findings are contextualized with prevailing models of the developing lexicon.