Acoustic cues to grammatical structure in infant-directed speech: Cross-linguistic evidence
Acoustic cues to grammatical structure in infant-directed speech: Cross-linguistic evidence
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DOI：
10.2307/1131774
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发表时间：
1996-12-01
影响因子：
4.6
通讯作者：
Tokura, H
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Fisher, C;Tokura, H
一些理论家认为，婴儿使用韵律线索，如停顿、最后的延长和音高变化来识别言语中的语言单位。然而，这一建议的一个潜在困难是，话语的声学形状受句法以外的许多因素的影响，包括语音、词汇和话语结构。这就提出了一个问题：婴儿是如何在不排除其他影响的情况下，将时间和音高作为语言结构任何方面的线索的？在对13.5-14个月大的婴儿进行的自发语音的连接样本的声学分析中，美国英语母亲和讲日语的母亲发现，语音和短语水平的声学规律都足够大，可以在自发语音中检测到，而不需要纠正对相同声学特征的其他影响。(1)两种语言的词尾元音都被拉长，并经历了夸张的音高变化；(2)持续时间（英语）或音高（日语）的局部声学变化与话语中的某些短语边界可靠相关。这些发现表明，一个幼稚的听者可以根据观察到的句子中稳健的声学模式来估计每种语言的粗略韵律模板。我们讨论了学习者如何将声学分析和分布分析结合起来，以获取韵律括号线索中的语言特异性变化，并获得话语内部结构的间接感知证据。
Several theorists have suggested that infants use prosodic cues such as pauses, final lengthening, and pitch changes to identify linguistic units in speech. One potential difficulty with this proposal, however, is that the acoustic shape of an utterance is affected by many factors other than its syntax, including its phonetic, lexical, and discourse structure. This has raised questions about how the infant could use timing and pitch as cues to any aspect of linguistic structure without simultaneously factoring out other effects. Acoustic analyses of connected samples of spontaneous speech addressed to 13.5-14-month-old infants by American English- and by Japanese-speaking mothers revealed that both utterance- and phrase-level acoustic regularities were large enough to be detected in spontaneous speech without correcting for other influences on the same acoustic features. (1) Utterance-final vowels were lengthened and underwent exaggerated pitch changes in both languages, and (2) local acoustic changes in duration (English) or pitch (Japanese) were reliably associated with some phrase boundaries within utterances. These findings suggest that a naive listener could estimate a rough prosodic template for each language based on robust acoustic patterns in observed sentences. We discuss ways in which the learner could combine acoustic and distributional analyses across utterances to acquire language-specific variations in prosodic bracketing cues and to obtain indirect perceptual evidence for the internal structure of utterances.