Crosslinguistic developmental comparison of the processing of consonants and vowels in early lexical acquisition

Nespor et al.（2003）提出的辅音比元音更参与单词编码和识别的建议得到了幼儿和成人研究的支持。然而，虽然这种辅音优势（也称为C偏误）在不同语言的成年期可能非常稳定，但它的出现可能不会遵循相同的轨迹在婴儿期跨语言，因为语言之间的差异已经在发展文献中报道。事实上，虽然在法语中的辅音优势在词汇水平上已被坚定地证明从8个月的年龄起，这种不对称性尚未观察到之前的30个月的英语。此外，在20个月时，德语学习的婴儿被证明对元音和辅音信息一样敏感，而丹麦语学习的婴儿对元音有偏见。这种跨语言的差异强烈地表明，词汇C偏置是在语言习得过程中获得的，这质疑了最初的假设，即语言普遍的，可能是先天的偏置，有利于词汇习得。然而，它仍然是一个问题，具体的语言属性影响的表达的C偏置。拟议的跨语言发展项目的目的是阐明更多的潜在作用，语言输入的出现和时间过程中的C-偏见系统地比较相对敏感性和使用辅音和元音的德语和法语学习的婴儿在不同的年龄和不同的词汇任务。德语和法语在可能影响辅音和元音处理的几个变量上存在差异：（德语：25-15 vs.法语17-15），他们的节奏结构（德语：重音定时语言，法语：音节为基础的语言），词汇重音的存在（德语中有，法语中没有），紧张的语音特征（德语区分紧元音和松元音;法语不区分）等。将在巴黎和波茨坦收集从出生到20个月的学习法语和德语的婴儿的数据。所有任务都在不同的处理水平上利用辅音和元音信息在词汇相关处理中的比较使用：任务1-2将集中于处理没有意义的单词形式，任务3-5将集中于处理已知单词。这些研究将依赖于一系列行为（HPP，眼动跟踪），电生理（ERP）和神经成像（NIRS）技术。我们的研究结果将为词汇加工中C偏误的起源和发展轨迹提供重要的信息。它将通过探索出生时辅音和元音的不同作用，并通过确定C偏置出现的跨语言不变与语言特定方面，对先天感知能力和语言输入之间的相互作用带来新的见解。

The proposal by Nespor et al. (2003) that consonants are more involved than vowels in word encoding and recognition has been supported by both toddler and adult studies. However, while this consonantal advantage (also called C-bias) is possibly very stable in adulthood across languages, its emergence might not follow the same trajectory cross-linguistically in infancy as differences between languages have been reported in the developmental literature. Indeed, while in French a consonant advantage at the lexical level has been firmly demonstrated from 8 months of age onwards, this asymmetry has not been observed before 30 months of age in English. Moreover, at 20 months, German-learning infants were shown to be as sensitive to vocalic as to consonantal information, and Danish-learning infants have a vocalic bias. This cross-linguistic variation strongly suggests that the lexical C-bias is acquired during language acquisition, which questions the original assumption of a language-general, possibly innate bias that facilitates lexical acquisition. However, it is still under question which language-specific properties affect the expression of the C-bias. The proposed cross-linguistic developmental project aims to shed more light on the potential role of language input in the emergence and the time course of the C-bias by systematically comparing the relative sensitivity to and use of consonants and vowels by German- and French-learning infants at different ages and across different lexical tasks. German and French differ on several variables likely to affect the processing of consonants and vowels: their consonant-vowel ratio (German: 25-15 vs. French 17-15), their rhythmic structure (German: stress-timed language, French: syllable-based language), the existence of lexical stress (present in German, but not in French), the phonetic feature of tenseness (German distinguishes tense and lax vowels; French does not), etc. Data from French- and German-learning infants from birth to 20 months will be collected in Paris and Potsdam. All tasks tap into the comparative use of consonantal and vocalic information in lexically-related processing at different processing levels: TASKs 1-2 will focus on the processing of word forms without meaning and TASKs 3-5 will focus on the processing of known words. The studies will rely on an array of behavioral (HPP, eye-tracking), electrophysiological (ERPs), and neuroimaging (NIRS) techniques. Our findings will bring crucial information regarding the origin and developmental trajectory of the C-bias in lexical processing. It will bring new insights about the interaction between innate perceptual capacities and linguistic input by exploring the differential roles of consonants and vowels at birth and by determining the cross-linguistically invariant versus language-specific aspects of the emergence of the C-bias.