PERCEPTUAL SEGMENTATION OF SPEECH BY INFANTS

这项资助中概述的研究计划的目的 建议确定人类婴儿是否在后六个月 几个月的生活能够感知地切分流利的语言 转换成字长单位，可以用来理解他们的 母语。尽管在过去的15年里有很多研究 记录了复杂的言语歧视 对于幼儿的能力，这些研究主要集中在 婴儿对孤立语音片段的感知。的研究 基于语音产生的语音分割受到以下限制 婴儿曾经表现出的发音控制不良 产生于感知分割必须 在单词产生之前。与人们所认为的 孤立的语音片段，流畅的语音感知 需要在线处理和提取离散数据 来自语音波形的声学单元，其特征在于 单词边界的声学标记不一致。二 问题很关键：(A)婴儿能提取熟悉的声音吗？ 从流利的语音中识别单元并认识到这一点的等价性 单位在不同的情况下，和(B)是这个提取过程 由于声学单位进入词典而变得更容易？ 我们将使用三种策略来研究语音切分 在6到12个月大的婴儿中。首先，一个可操作的掉头程序 并将使用视觉习服程序来评估婴儿的 从流畅的语音中提取字长单位。变量 虽然会影响分段(例如，语速、语调 以及重音、相邻语音片段的协同发音)将是 检查了这些片段提取任务。第二，演讲 母亲对婴儿的投入将被详细地分析 详细描述其可变性和一致性 分割的声学提示被呈现给婴儿。 短期的“培训”研究将评估参考在 婴儿对单词和假词的切分。第三，婴儿的 对语速和重音模式变化的偏好 以确定这些超段是否 流利的语言会影响婴儿的注意力。已被占用 总而言之，这些研究将澄清一个研究不足但至关重要的 词汇和句法所需的语言方面 发展。

The purpose of the program of research outlined in this grant proposal is to determine whether human infants in the second six months of life are able to perceptually segment fluent speech into word-length units that could be used to understand their native language. Although many studies in the past 15 years have documented the sophisticated speech discrimination capacities of young infants, those studies have focussed on the infant's perception of isolated speech segments. Studies of speech segmentation based on speech production are limited by the poor articulatory control shown by infants once words are produced and by the fact that perceptual segmentation must precede word production. In contrast to the perception of isolated speech segments, the perception of fluent speech requires on-line processing ant the extraction of discrete acoustic units from a speech waveform characterized by inconsistent acoustic markers for word boundaries. Two questions are critical: (a) can infants extract a familiar acoustic unit from fluent speech and recognize the equivalence of this unit in various contexts, and (b) is this extraction process facilitated by the entry of acoustic units into the lexicon? Three strategies will be employed to study speech segmentation in 6- to 12-month-olds. First, an operant headturning procedure and a visual habituation procedure will be used to assess infants' extraction of word-length units from fluent speech. Variables though to influence segmentation (e.g., speaking rate, intonation and stress, coarticulation of adjacent phonetic segments) will be examined on these segment extraction tasks. Second, the speech INPUT to the infant from the mother will be analyzed in great detail to describe the variability and consistency with which acoustic cues to segmentation are presented to the infant. Short-term "training" studies will assess the role of reference in infants' segmentation of words and pseudowords. Third, infants' preferences for variations in speaking rate and stress patterns will be obtained to determine whether these suprasegmental aspects of fluent speech influence infants' attention. Taken together, these studies will clarify an under-studied but essential aspect of language required for lexical and syntactic development.