Development of prosodic competence in early first language acquisition: Behavioral and neurophysiological investigations

该项目的目标是在第一语言习得中非常早期的韵律发展，重点是韵律边界的音系和声学相关性。基于以前的发现，这些线索的特定星座和听者对它们的权重受到跨语言变化的影响，我们将调查德语学习儿童对德语典型的韵律边界标记表现出的敏感性。为了更好地理解德语中韵律边界是如何标记的，我们将首先对德语使用者产生的具有不同韵律边界位置的话语进行韵律分析，并测试德国成年人对相关线索的加工。这些结果将指导德国4个月到8个月大的婴儿进行纵向设计的知觉实验的实验材料的构建。在这些实验中，将测试婴儿对具有自然韵律边界的语音材料的反应，以及对其中单一声音线索被操纵的语音材料的反应。对于这些感知实验，将使用行为方法以及神经生理学测量(EEG)。我们的研究将对儿童基本知觉机制的相互作用以及他们对目的语特定特征的协调提供新的见解，并将加深我们对韵律能力下神经机制发展的理解。

The project aims at the very early prosodic development in first language acquisition with a focus of phonological and acoustic correlates of prosodic boundaries. Based on previous findings that the specific constellation of these cues and their weighting by the hearer Is subject to crosslinguistic variation we will Investigate when the German learning child shows a sensitivity to the prosodic boundary markings typical for German. To get a better understanding how prosodic boundaries are marked in German we will first do a prosodic analysis of utterances with different positions of prosodic boundaries produced by German speakers and test German adults on their processing of the relevant cues. These results will guide the construction of the experimental material for perceptual experiments planned with German Infants between 4-months and 8-months of age in a longitudinal design. In these experiments Infants reactions to speech material with natural prosodic boundaries and to speech material in which single acoustic cues had been manipulated will be tested. For these perceptual experiments behavioural methods as well as neurophysiological measures (EEG) will be used. Our studies will provide new insights into the Interaction of basic perceptual mechanism the child Is equipped with and their attunement to the specific features of the target language and will improve our understanding of the development of the neural mechanisms underiying prosodic competencies.