DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE AND ATTENTION IN INFANCY

婴儿期语言和注意力的发展

• 批准号: 6181881
• 负责人: Rochelle S NEWMAN
• 金额: $ 2.44万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1999
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1999-08-01 至 2001-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6181881
• 关键词: attention; auditory stimulus; clinical research; human subject; infant human (0-1 year); language development; learning; noise; psychoacoustics; psycholinguistics; speech recognition

The modern household can be a chaotic place, full of noise from televisions, computers, and playing children. This proposal comprises two sets of studies that, taken together, will greatly enhance our understanding of how infants learn language in such an acoustically hostile environment. These studies investigate both how infants disentangle the speech of different talkers speaking simultaneously, and how much experience they need in order to then separate that fluent speech into individual words. Most research on infant language acquisition has taken place in quiet laboratory rooms with no outside distractions, but in the real world, speech directed to infants often occurs in the presence of competing acoustic signals. Most current theories of language acquisition suggest that children "bootstrap" their way into language comprehension by exposure to large amounts of language information. Infants' ability to separate speech from background noise limits the amount of this information they can use. Thus, studying these basic attention abilities provides an important underpinning for theories of language acquisition. In addition, understanding the degree to which infants are affected by background noise is relevant in evaluating child-care decisions, as settings involving greater numbers of children are likely to result in greater degrees of noise. If infants have difficulty selectively attending to a caregiver in noisy situations, infants placed in quieter environments may have an advantage in learning language. The first set of studies examines how infants learn language in non-ideal environments. Recent research has shown that infants, like adults, have the ability to separate streams of auditory information (Newman and Jusczyk, 1996). Little is known about the limits of this ability, however, and the studies described here examine this more fully. A second set of studies investigates the amount of exposure to language an infant requires to begin the language-learning process. Many theories assume infants need linguistic experience to pick out individual words from fluent speech, but how much experience is required remains unclear. The present studies explore this issue, as well as whether infants can learn language from non-interactive situations, such as watching television. These studies further explore the role of early attentional and segmental mechanisms on language development, with the goal of constructing a theoretical model of infant language acquisition, one which is grounded in a better understanding of the problems infants face outside of the laboratory.

现代家庭可能是一个混乱的地方，充满了电视，电脑和玩耍的孩子的噪音。 这项建议包括两组研究，放在一起，将大大提高我们对婴儿如何在这样一个声学敌对的环境中学习语言的理解。 这些研究调查了婴儿如何区分不同说话者同时说话的语音，以及他们需要多少经验才能将流利的语音分离成单个单词。大多数关于婴儿语言习得的研究都是在没有外界干扰的安静的实验室里进行的，但在真实的世界里，针对婴儿的言语往往是在存在竞争性声学信号的情况下发生的。 目前大多数语言习得理论认为，儿童通过接触大量的语言信息来“引导”他们的语言理解。 婴儿从背景噪音中分离语音的能力限制了他们可以使用的信息量。 因此，研究这些基本的注意能力为语言习得理论提供了重要的基础。 此外，了解婴儿受背景噪音影响的程度与评估儿童保育决定有关，因为涉及更多儿童的环境可能导致更大程度的噪音。 如果婴儿在嘈杂的环境中难以选择性地关注看护者，则放置在较安静的环境中的婴儿在学习语言方面可能具有优势。第一组研究考察了婴儿如何在非理想环境中学习语言。 最近的研究表明，婴儿和成年人一样，有能力分离听觉信息流（纽曼和Jusczyk，1996）。 然而，人们对这种能力的局限性知之甚少，这里描述的研究对此进行了更全面的研究。 第二组研究调查了婴儿开始语言学习过程所需的语言接触量。 许多理论认为婴儿需要语言经验才能从流利的话语中挑出个别单词，但需要多少经验仍不清楚。 目前的研究探讨了这个问题，以及婴儿是否可以从非互动的情况下学习语言，如看电视。这些研究进一步探讨了早期注意和音段机制在语言发展中的作用，旨在构建一个婴儿语言习得的理论模型，该模型基于对婴儿在实验室外面临的问题的更好理解。