Dissertation Research: Using Acoustic Data to Infer Linguistic Representations in Three Populations

研究正常成人语言特性的一种方法是关注其他人群的这些特性，这些人群的语言刚刚发展或已经崩溃。这种研究语言的方法依赖于在不同的语言使用者中找到一种共同的模式，这种模式可以让我们深入了解语言作为一个整体是如何工作的。本论文研究项目将使用三个人群（语言发育正常的幼儿，具有特定语言障碍的稍大的儿童和患有非流利性失语症的成年人）来解决韵律的作用（例如，单词和句子的节奏结构）在他们的言语中起作用，以及语言的心理表征如何影响言语的产生。具体来说，研究将探讨一个特殊的现象，共同的讲话，这些人口：省略的初始非重读音节的多音节词。声学数据将被用来调查的问题，是否，当儿童或语言障碍人群省略这些音节，他们的心理表征的韵律的话仍然完好无损，以及如何韵律结构保存在他们的生产。

One way to study the properties of normal adult language is to focus on these properties in other populations in whom language is just developing or in whom it has broken down. This approach to the study of language depends on finding a common pattern across different language users that can give us insight into how language works as a whole. This dissertation research project will use three populations (young children with normally developing language, slightly older children with specific language impairment, and adults with nonfluent aphasia) to address what role prosody (e.g., the rhythm structure of words and sentences) plays in their speech and how mental representations of language affect the production of speech. Specifically, the research will examine a particular phenomenon common to the speech of these populations: the omission of initial unstressed syllables within multisyllabic words. Acoustic data will be used to investigate the question of whether, when children or language disordered populations omit these syllables, their mental representation of the prosody of the words remains intact, and how prosodic structure is preserved in their productions.