Effects of Prosody and Lexical Familiarity on Perceptual and Accoustic Measures of Young Children

韵律和词汇熟悉度对幼儿感知和听觉测量的影响

• 批准号: 9709774
• 负责人: LouAnn Gerken
• 金额: $ 31.73万
• 依托单位: University of Arizona
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1997
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1997-08-01 至 2001-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9709774&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Effects; Prosody; Lexical; Familiarity; Perceptual

The most frequent source of data used to understand the nature of both normal and disordered language development is children s productions. The properties of child utterances that deviate from adult forms are of particular interest, since they appear to reflect parts of the adult system that the child has not yet mastered. One of the most common types of deviation from adult forms seen in normally developing children between the ages of 24 and 30 months, as well as in older children with language disorders, is omissions, including omissions of mono-syllabic grammatical morphemes (e.g., the ) and unstressed mono-morphemic syllables (e.g., the first syllable of giraffe ). Data from numerous researchers suggest that such omitted syllables are not simply missing from children s representations of language. The proposed research continues in this framework, but begins to move beyond the question of whether normally developing children have some representation of syllables they omit to a question of why they omit these syllables. In keeping with this expanded focus, the proposal begins to draw more heavily on studies of adult language production as a framework for understanding child production. The proposed experiments are divided into three sets. Exps. 1-4 are based on observations of the role of prosody (i.e., rhythm and intonation) in children s omissions, along with an observed bias for children to produce final syllables. The goal of these experiments is to compare two prosodic accounts of children s omissions, one proposed previously and a new account derived from current linguistic theories of prosody as well as studies of adult language production. If the new account is supported, it would provide a unified account of English-speaking children s weak syllable omissions and a framework for viewing the relation of immature and mature language systems. Exps. 5-8 are based on the observation that children are more likely to omit weak sylla bles from sentences containing an unfamiliar word. These experiments promise to shed light on how utterance complexity affects child productions and how prosody fits within the larger language production system. Two of the experiments in this section also use work on adult language production to make predictions about child production. Exps. 9-10 are based on a pilot study that suggests children maintain a slot for weak syllables that they appear to omit. These experiments have the potential to confirm the notion that children have some representation of elements that they do not produce in an adult-like way. They also have the potential to relate child omissions to studies of adult production. Taken together, the experiments will reveal considerable information about normally developing children s growing knowledge of language and how this knowledge is implemented by their changing language production system.

用来理解正常和无序语言发展本质的最常见的数据来源是儿童S的作品。偏离成人形式的儿童话语的特性特别令人感兴趣，因为它们似乎反映了儿童尚未掌握的成人系统的一部分。在24至30个月的正常发育儿童以及患有语言障碍的较大儿童中，最常见的偏离成人形式的类型之一是遗漏，包括遗漏单音节语法语素(例如，the)和非重读的单音节音节(例如，长颈鹿的第一个音节)。来自众多研究人员的数据表明，这种被省略的音节并不是简单地从儿童S的语言表征中缺失的。这项拟议的研究继续在这个框架下进行，但开始超越正常发育儿童是否有他们省略的音节的问题，转向为什么他们省略这些音节的问题。为了与这一扩展的重点保持一致，该提案开始更多地利用成人语言产生的研究作为理解儿童产生的框架。拟议的实验分为三组。实验。1-4是基于对韵律(即节奏和语调)在儿童S遗漏中的作用的观察，以及对儿童产生最后音节的偏见的观察。这些实验的目的是比较两种关于儿童S遗漏的韵律描述，一种是先前提出的描述，另一种是根据当前韵律语言学理论和成人语言产生研究得出的新描述。如果这一新的描述得到支持，它将为说英语的儿童S弱音节省略提供一个统一的解释，并为观察不成熟语言系统与成熟语言系统之间的关系提供一个框架。实验。5-8是基于这样一种观察，即儿童更有可能在包含陌生单词的句子中省略较弱的Sylla ble。这些实验有望阐明话语复杂性如何影响儿童的产出，以及韵律如何适应更大的语言产出系统。这一部分中的两个实验也使用成人语言产生的工作来预测儿童的产生。实验。9-10是基于一项初步研究，该研究建议儿童为他们似乎遗漏的弱音节留出一段时间。这些实验有可能证实这样一种观点，即儿童拥有一些他们不像成年人那样产生的元素的表征。它们还有可能将儿童遗漏与成人生育研究联系起来。综上所述，这些实验将揭示发育正常的儿童S不断增长的语言知识以及这些知识是如何通过不断变化的语言生成系统实现的大量信息。