Development of Infant Stream Segregation: The Interplay Between Perception & Cognition

婴儿有时会在安静的环境中听到讲话，但通常他们必须将讲话与背景中的许多其他声音(电视、洗碗机、交通、其他人交谈等)分开。值得注意的是，婴儿能够如此有效地将语音与背景噪音区分开来，特别是考虑到研究表明，婴儿无法使用成年人在感知语音时使用的那种感知线索。在国家科学基金会的支持下，纽曼博士正在进行一系列关于婴儿语音感知的实验。这些实验旨在研究婴儿被假设用来区分语音和背景噪音的两种类型的感知线索：1)与说话者的性别相关的声音质量，以及2)与所说语言相关的语音质量。此前的研究表明，婴儿仅在出生几天后就能区分不同的声音和不同的语言，因此，用于区分这些声音和语言的感知机制也可能被用来更普遍地区分语音和背景噪音。然而，不同的理论根据年龄的不同预测不同的结果，所以实验将测试不同年龄的婴儿，以提供证据来支持相互竞争的理论，从而帮助完善和发展它们。这项研究还对理解听觉和语言系统在婴儿期的形成阶段如何发展具有更广泛的意义。因此，这项研究创造的基本知识有望为父母和其他照顾者提供信息，说明家庭声音和其他听觉干扰可能对婴儿发育产生的影响。

Infants sometimes hear speech in quiet settings, but oftentimes they must separate speech from many other sounds in the background (the television, the dishwasher, traffic, other people talking, and so on). It is remarkable that infants can separate speech from background noises so effectively, especially given research indicating that infants are unable to use the kinds of perceptual cues that adults use when perceiving speech. With support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Newman is conducting a series of experiments on infant speech perception. The experiments are designed to investigate two types of perceptual cues that infants are hypothesized to use in separating speech from background noises: 1) voice qualities associated with the gender of a speaker, and 2) phonetic qualities associated with the language being spoken. Previous studies have shown that infants can distinguish between different voices and different languages only a few days after birth, so it is possible that the perceptual mechanisms used to make these distinctions are also used to more generally distinguish speech from background noises. However, different theories predict different results as a function of age, so the experiments will test infants at different ages to bring evidence to bear on the competing theories, thereby helping to refine and advance them. The research also has broader implications for understanding of how auditory and language systems develop in the formative years of infancy. Thus the basic knowledge created by this research promises to be informative for parents and other caregivers in terms of the impact that household sounds and other auditory distractions may have on infant development.