Analysis of infant-directed speech by acoustic and computational modeling methods.

本研究的目的是探讨婴儿导向言语（IDS）与成人导向言语（ADS）在本质上的区别，以及IDS的性质对婴儿语音习得的作用。特别是，我们专注于元音类别的收购。在获取元音类别时，根据元音的音质差异（即：即，a/、/i/、/u/、/e/、/o/），为ADS开发的SOM模型也能够从IDS学习类似的类别。然而，短元音和长元音之间的区别变得特别具有挑战性。这是因为元音的实际持续时间变化很大，与语音学上的长短无关，我们正在继续研究模型需要哪些额外信息来获得长短元音的区别。

The goal of the present project was to investigate how the nature of infant-directed speech(IDS) differs from that of adult-directed speech(ADS), and what functions the properties of IDS may play for infants phonological acquisition. In particular, we focused on the vowel category acquisition. In acquiring vowel categories, based on the quality differences(i. e.,/a/,/i/,/u/,/e/,/o/), SOM models that were developed for ADS were able to learn similar categories from IDS as well. The distinction between short and long vowels, however, turned out to be particularly challenging. That was because the actual duration of the vowels varied widely independent of whether it is phonologically short or long, and we are continuing our research into what additional information will be necessary for a model to acquire the long-short vowel distinction.