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、电脑和玩耍儿童的噪音。这项建议包括两组研究，它们加在一起，将极大地增强我们对婴儿如何在如此恶劣的听觉环境中学习语言的理解。这些研究既调查了婴儿如何理清同时说话的不同说话者的语音，也调查了他们需要多少经验才能将流利的语音分离成单独的单词。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音信号存在的情况下进行的。大多数当前的语言习得理论认为，儿童通过接触大量的语言信息来“引导”他们进入语言理解的道路。婴儿将语音与背景噪音分开的能力限制了他们可以使用的信息量。因此，对这些基本注意能力的研究为语言习得理论提供了重要的基础。此外，了解婴儿受到背景噪音影响的程度对评估儿童保育决策具有重要意义，因为涉及更多儿童的环境可能会导致更大程度的噪音。如果婴儿在嘈杂的环境中很难有选择地照顾照顾者，那么放在安静的环境中的婴儿在学习语言方面可能会有优势。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，具有分离听觉信息流的能力(Newman和Jusczyk，1996)。然而，人们对这种能力的局限性知之甚少，这里描述的研究更全面地检验了这一点。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语言中辨别出单个单词，但目前还不清楚需要多少经验。目前的研究探讨了这一问题，以及婴儿是否可以从非互动环境中学习语言，例如看电视。这些研究进一步探索了早期注意和分段机制在语言发展中的作用，目的是构建一个婴儿语言习得的理论模型，该模型的基础是更好地理解婴儿在实验室外面临的问题。

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.