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

婴儿有时会在安静的环境中听到说话，但通常他们必须将说话与许多其他背景声音（电视、洗碗机、交通、其他人说话等）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，特别是考虑到有研究表明，婴儿在感知语音时无法使用成人使用的那种感知线索。在美国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言感知的实验。这些实验旨在研究婴儿在区分语音和背景噪音时所使用的两种感知线索：1)与说话者性别相关的语音品质，以及2)与说话者所说语言相关的语音品质。先前的研究表明，婴儿在出生后几天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有可能被用于更普遍地区分语音和背景噪音。然而，不同的理论预测不同的结果作为年龄的函数，所以实验将测试不同年龄的婴儿，为相互竞争的理论提供证据，从而帮助完善和推进它们。这项研究还对理解听觉和语言系统在婴儿形成时期的发展有更广泛的意义。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，了解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.