Multilevel prosodic processing in a crosslinguistic perspective

对早期语言习得的研究表明，韵律信息是婴儿习得目标语言词汇和句法特征的最早线索之一(例如Morgan&Demuth，2006)，婴儿在出生后的第一个月就获得了特定于语言的韵律特征(例如Höhle et al.，2009)。然而，关于一般的听觉机制如何对婴儿发育的语音系统做出贡献并被其塑造，我们还知之甚少。基于以前共同工作的结果(Bijeljac-Babic等人，2012年；Höhle等人，2009年)，本项目从跨语言的角度探讨这一问题，对学习法语和德语的儿童进行跨语言学习，这两种语言在单词重音和韵律短语的韵律系统上存在重大差异。首先，我们将通过调查婴儿对三种主要线索(时长、强度、音调)的敏感性来探讨在词汇水平上与转轮偏向习得有关的声学因素。其次，我们将探索婴儿和成年人在短语水平上对这些相同韵律线索的敏感性，因为有证据表明，这些线索在法语和德语的两个水平上使用不同。同时，基于单语者在这两种语言中呈现不同重音处理模式的结果，我们将考察法德双语者韵律系统的发展。婴儿早期知觉机制是由语言在习得中的语音特性决定的，这一发现为双语语言习得提供了特殊的挑战。因此，该项目将带来有关双语习得的关键数据，这是一个非常重要的问题，因为世界上大多数婴儿在成长过程中使用一种以上语言。我们的发现还可以在第二语言习得领域找到应用，通过建立培训计划来增强法国婴儿/成年人的压力感知和产出。德国和法国的合作伙伴使用相同的实验程序(HPP和ERP)和相同的材料将确保结果的可比性，并将使人们能够可靠地了解这两种语言早期单语和双语习得的差异和相似之处。

Research on early language acquisition has shown that prosodic 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 language specific prosodic properties within the first months of life (e.g. Höhle et al., 2009). Still, less is known regarding how general auditory mechanisms contribute to and are shaped by infants developing phonological system. Based on results from previous common work (Bijeljac-Babic et al., 2012; Höhle et al., 2009), the present project approaches this issue taking a crosslinguistic view on monolingual French and German learning children, two languages that have crucial differences in their prosodic systems of word stress and prosodic phrasing. First, we will explore the acoustic factors that are implicated in the acquisition of the trochaic bias at the lexical level, by investigating infants sensitivity to the three main cues (duration, intensity, pitch) that are used to mark lexical stress in different languages. Second, we will explore infants and adults sensitivity to these same prosodic cues at the phrase level, given evidence that these cues are used differently at the two levels in French and German. In parallel, based on the results on monolinguals showing different patterns of stress processing in these two languages, we will investigate the development of the prosodic system in French-German bilinguals. The findings that infants early perceptual mechanisms are shaped by the phonological properties of the language in acquisition provide a specific challenge for bilingual language acquisition. This project will thus bring crucial data on bilingual language acquisition, an issue of great importance given the fact that most infants in the world grow up with more than one language. Our findings could also found applications in the domain of second language acquisition, by setting up training programs to enhance stress perception and production in French infants/adults. The use of same experimental procedures (HPP and ERPs) and the same materials by the German and the French partners will ensure comparability of the results and will allow for reliable insights into differences and similarities of early monolingual and bilingual acquisition of these two languages.