DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE AND ATTENTION IN INFANCY

现代家庭可能是一个混乱的地方，充满了来自电视、电脑和玩耍的孩子的噪音。这一建议包括两组研究，它们结合在一起，将极大地增强我们对婴儿如何在这样一个声音敌对的环境中学习语言的理解。这些研究调查了婴儿是如何从同时说话的不同人的话语中分离出来的，以及他们需要多少经验才能将流利的话语分离成单独的单词。大多数关于婴儿语言习得的研究都是在安静的实验室里进行的，没有外界的干扰，但在现实世界中，针对婴儿的言语往往是在相互竞争的声学信号存在的情况下发生的。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”他们的语言理解方式。婴儿区分语音和背景噪音的能力限制了他们可以使用的信息的数量。因此，研究这些基本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策有关，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有选择照顾照顾者的困难，那么放在安静环境中的婴儿可能在学习语言方面有优势。第一组研究考察了婴儿在非理想环境中如何学习语言。最近的研究表明，婴儿和成年人一样，具有分离听觉信息流的能力（Newman and Jusczyk, 1996）。然而，人们对这种能力的局限性知之甚少，这里所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来从流利的言语中挑选出单个单词，但需要多少经验尚不清楚。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，比如看电视。这些研究进一步探讨了早期注意和片段机制在语言发展中的作用，旨在构建一个基于对婴儿在实验室之外面临的问题的更好理解的婴儿语言习得理论模型。

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.