The Development of Language and Attention in Infancy

婴儿期语言和注意力的发展

• 批准号: 9907849
• 负责人: Rochelle Newman
• 金额: $ 3.49万
• 依托单位: University of Iowa
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1999
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1999-10-01 至 2001-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9907849&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Development; Language; Attention; Infancy

There has been a great deal of research investigating a phenomenon known as "motherese". This refers to the fact that most adults adjust their speech when talking to an infant. Research has shown that infants prefer listening to this type of speech, suggesting that its purpose may be to increase infant attention levels to speech, thus aiding language learning. Another possibility is that these variations in speaking style serve to make speech more unique, and thus easier to separate from background speech. In fact, many of the variations common in motherese are analogous to cues shown to be important in musical streaming. Parents report that they frequently speak to their infants when other speech is occurring in the background, suggesting that there might be a need for such aids to streaming. Although most adults do adjust their speech when speaking to an infant, they vary tremendously in the degree to which this occurs. If these adjustments help infants to separate the speech of simultaneous talkers, then speakers who use more extreme versions of motherese should be easier to separate from adult-directed background speech than are other speakers. We will present 20 adult listeners with the speech recordings used in our infant streaming experiment. They will be asked to rate the extent to which these talkers exemplified motherese speech. These ratings will then be used in a re-analysis of our infant studies, to determine whether those infants who listened to speakers with more exaggerated speech perform better at the streaming task than do those listening to less extreme versions of motherese speech. The results of this study will contribute to the understanding of early language acquisition in children.

已经有大量研究对一种被称为“母亲”的现象进行了调查。这是指大多数成年人在与婴儿交谈时会调整他们的言辞。研究表明，婴儿更喜欢听这种类型的语言，这表明它的目的可能是提高婴儿对语言的注意力水平，从而帮助语言学习。另一种可能性是，说话风格的这些变化使讲话更加独特，因此更容易与背景讲话分开。事实上，母语中常见的许多变体都类似于音乐流媒体中显示的重要线索。父母们报告说，当其他语言在背景中发生时，他们经常与婴儿交谈，这表明可能需要这样的辅助手段来进行流媒体。虽然大多数成年人在和婴儿说话时都会调整他们的语言，但他们在这种情况下会有很大的不同。如果这些调整有助于婴儿区分同时说话的人的语音，那么使用更极端版本的母语的说话者应该比其他说话者更容易与成人定向的背景语音分开。我们将向20名成年听众展示我们的婴儿流媒体实验中使用的语音录音。他们将被要求评价这些说话者在多大程度上体现了母亲的讲话。然后，这些评分将被用来对我们的婴儿研究进行重新分析，以确定那些听了更夸张的讲话的婴儿是否比那些听不那么极端的母亲讲话的婴儿在流媒体任务中表现得更好。本研究的结果将有助于对儿童早期语言习得的理解。