Crosslinguistic investigations on the development of rhythmic preferences in German and French infants

最近关于早期语言习得的研究提供了证据，表明节奏信息是婴儿用来习得目标语言词汇和句法特性的最早线索之一（例如，Morgan & Demuth, 2006），婴儿在出生后的头几个月里习得目标语言的特定节奏和其他韵律特性（有关回顾和最新数据，参见Höhle， Bijeljac- Babic, Herold, Weissenborn & Nazzi, in press）。一般的听觉偏差是如何与目标语言的特定声学特性相互作用的，人们对这个问题知之甚少。从跨语言学的角度来看，该项目将比较婴儿学习语言时对节奏模式的早期感知偏好，这些节奏模式在节奏组织上存在根本差异。德语的节奏是以重音为基础的，在词汇重音水平上以扬抑格为主，而法语的节奏是以音节为基础的，没有词汇重音，但由于词尾拉长而突出。我们之前关于压力模式偏好和歧视的发展工作揭示了单语法语和德语婴儿之间的感知差异（Höhle等人，出版中；Bijeljac- Babic, Serres， Höhle和Nazzi，准备中）。在这项工作之后，为了建立一般声学机制对扬格偏倚习得的预测效果，我们将首先质疑扬格/扬格规律独立于母语特性的说法（Hay & Diehl, 2007），通过使用更多类似语言的条件，在单语德语和法语成人和婴儿中重新评估这一规律（第1部分）。其次，我们将扩展我们在重音模式偏好（Höhle等人，在新闻中）、重音歧视（Höhle等人，在新闻中；bijeljacc - babic等人，在准备中）以及在双语法语-德语成人和婴儿中应用抑扬格/扬格律方面的发展和成人工作，以评估双语（法语-德语）环境对韵律加工的影响（第2部分）。

Recent research on early language acquisition has provided evidence that rhythmic information is one of the earliest cues infants use to bootstrap into the acquisition of lexical and syntactic properties of the target language (e.g., Morgan & Demuth, 2006) and that infants acquire the specific rhythmic and other prosodic properties of their target language within the first months of life (for a review and recent data, see Höhle, Bijeljac- Babic, Herold, Weissenborn & Nazzi, in press). Less is known about the question of how general auditory biases interact with the specific acoustic properties of the target language. Taking a crosslinguistic perspective, this project will compare early perceptual preferences of rhythmic patterns in infants learning languages that fundamentally differ in their rhythmic organization. Whereas German shows a stressed-based rhythm with a trochaic dominance on the level of lexical stress, French has a syllable-based rhythm with no lexical stress but phrase-final prominence due to final lengthening. Our previous developmental work on stress pattern preference and discrimination has revealed perceptual differences between monolingual French and German infants (Höhle et al., in press; Bijeljac- Babic, Serres, Höhle & Nazzi, in preparation). Following this work, and to establish predicted effects of general acoustic mechanisms for the acquisition of the trochaic bias, we will first question the claim that the iambic/trochaic law applies independently of the properties of the native language (Hay & Diehl, 2007) by reassessing this law in monolingual German and French adults and infants, using more language-like conditions (Part 1). Second, we will expand our developmental and adult work on stress pattern preference (Höhle et al., in press), stress discrimination (Höhle et al., in press; Bijeljac-Babic et al., in preparation), and the application of the iambic/trochaic law to bilingual French-German adults and infants in order to evaluate the influence of a bilingual (French-German) environment on prosodic processing (Part 2).