DHB: Collaborative Research: Cognitive and Social Development in Linguistic Change: A Pilot Study

当孩子学习一门语言时，他们必须理解周围听到的语言。但是这种语言并不总是一样的，它会因说话者和场合的不同而不同。孩子听不同的人说话也不同，他/她的妈妈在和他/她玩耍或管教他/她时也会使用不同的语言。匹兹堡大学的Suzanne Curtin和Scott Kiesling教授以及卡耐基梅隆大学的Lori Holt教授是语言学家和心理学家，他们正在探索儿童如何在他们的脑海中组织语音，以及为什么他们最终会这样说话。照顾者在这个过程中有多大的影响？研究人员从之前的研究中得知，孩子们并不能完全复制父母的口音，但父母的口音通常会对他们的说话方式产生影响。人们还观察到，父母有外国口音的孩子有时不会意识到他们的父母说话与母语人士不同。孩子的口音哪些方面受到照顾者的影响，哪些方面是由其他力量（尤其是同龄人）决定的，在什么年龄？了解每个孩子是如何发展自己独特的语言模式的，将有助于更好地理解孩子所听到的语言在塑造他们如何习得语言的过程中所起的作用。这一领域的大多数研究都比较了父母来自不同语言背景的成年人和儿童的语言。这项研究探讨了儿童如何感知他们周围听到的语言，他们如何在他们的脑海中表达这些语言，以及随着他们的成熟，这些知识是如何变化的。元音在方言中的发音比其他语音更有可能不同，即使是同一个说话者。例如，来自芝加哥的人说“hat”中的元音的方式对来自田纳西州的人来说是明显的，但这两个城市之间的辅音没有区别。由于元音在发音上的变化更大，也更容易用语音设备测量，我们关注的是儿童如何感知元音差异。首先，6到24个月大的孩子将接受测试，看他们是否能听到单词“hay”和单词“hoe”中元音的不同发音。在第二个实验中，孩子们接受测试，看他们是否更喜欢“hoe”元音的一种发音方式。将测试记录儿童与同龄儿童自然互动的方法，以及记录儿童与照顾者互动的方法。这些方法将有助于确定儿童如何整理他们从周围的语言中接收到的所有可变信息，并提出自己的说话方式，并将在未来的研究中使用，该研究将跟踪儿童从婴儿期到学龄。

When a child acquires a language, they must make sense of the language they hear around them. But this language is not always the same - it varies from speaker to speaker and situation to situation. Different people the child hears speak differently, and his/her mother will also use different kinds of language when playing or disciplining him/her. Professors Suzanne Curtin and Scott Kiesling of the University of Pittsburgh and Lori Holt of Carnegie Mellon University are linguists and psychologists who are exploring how children manage to organize speech sounds in their minds, and why they end up speaking the way they do. How much influence do caregivers have in this process? Researchers know from previous studies that children do not reproduce their parents' accent exactly, but that their parents' accent usually does make a difference in how they talk. It has also been observed that children of parents who have foreign accents are sometimes not aware that their parents speak differently from native speakers. What aspects of the child's accent are influenced by the caregiver, and what are determined by other forces (especially peers), and at what age? Understanding how individual children develop their own unique speech pattern will provide a greater understanding of the role of the language that children hear in shaping how they acquire language. Most research in this area has compared the speech produced by adults and children who have parents from different language backgrounds. This study explores how children perceive the language they hear around them, how they represent it in their minds, and how that knowledge changes as they mature.Vowels are more likely to be pronounced differently in dialects than other speech sounds, even in the same speaker. For example, the way someone from Chicago says the vowel in "hat" is noticeable to someone from Tennessee, but there are no differences in the consonants between these two cities. Since vowels are more variable in pronunciation, and are also more easily measured with phonetic equipment, we focus on how children perceive vowel differences. First, children 6 to 24 months will be tested to see whether they can hear different ways of pronouncing the vowel in the word 'hay,' and in the word 'hoe.' In a second experiment, children are tested to see if they prefer one way of pronouncing the 'hoe' vowel over another instance. Methods to record children in naturalistic interaction with same-age children will be tested, as will methods to record interactions with a caregiver. These methods will help determine how children sort out all the variable information they receive in the speech around them and come up with their own way of speaking, and will be used in a future study that will follow children from infancy to school-age.