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

用于理解正常和紊乱语言发展本质的最常见的数据来源是儿童的作品。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部分。在24至30个月的正常发育儿童以及患有语言障碍的年龄较大的儿童中，最常见的偏离成人形式的类型之一是省略，包括单音节语法语素的省略（例如， the）和非重读单语素音节（例如， 长颈鹿的第一个音节）。 许多研究人员的数据表明，这些省略的音节不仅仅是儿童语言表征中的缺失。 拟议的研究继续在这个框架内，但开始超越正常发育的儿童是否有一些代表音节，他们省略了一个问题，为什么他们省略这些音节。为了与这一扩大的重点保持一致，该提案开始更多地借鉴成人语言生产的研究，作为理解儿童生产的框架。 拟议的实验分为三组。 实验1-4是基于对韵律作用的观察（即，节奏和语调），沿着观察到的儿童产生最后音节的偏差。这些实验的目的是比较两个韵律帐户的儿童的遗漏，一个以前提出的和一个新的帐户来自当前的语言学理论的韵律以及成人语言生产的研究。如果这一新的解释得到支持，它将为英语儿童的弱音节省略提供一个统一的解释，并为观察不成熟和成熟语言系统的关系提供一个框架。 实验5-8是基于这样的观察，即儿童更有可能从包含不熟悉单词的句子中省略弱音节。这些实验有望揭示 话语的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。 本节中的两个实验也使用成人语言产生的工作来预测儿童的语言产生。实验9-10是基于一项试点研究，该研究建议儿童保留一个他们似乎省略的弱音节。这些实验有可能证实这样一个观点，即儿童对元素有某种表征，而他们不会以成人的方式产生。它们也有可能将儿童遗漏与成人生产研究联系起来。 总之，这些实验将揭示有关正常发育儿童的语言知识增长以及这些知识如何通过他们不断变化的语言产生系统来实现的大量信息。

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.