STATISTICAL LANGUAGE LEARNING IN HUMAN INFANTS

婴儿语言学习的统计

• 批准号: 6151172
• 负责人: Richard Aslin
• 金额: $ 13.93万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1999
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1999-02-01 至 2003-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6151172
• 关键词: behavioral /social science research tag; child behavior; clinical research; cues; early experience; human subject; infant human (0-1 year); language development; noise; psychoacoustics; speech synthesizers

The goal of the project is to reveal how normal human infants, during the second six months of postnatal development, acquire the sound- structures that will become words in their native language. This process of early world learning, which occurs before infants begin to produce words in their speech, must involve the segmentation of stretches of fluent adult speech that correspond to words. Infants presumably use both acoustic cues, such as pauses and prosody (e.g., pitch and stress), and distributional cues, such as the statistical patterning of sequences of sounds, to solve the word-segmentation task. Using a preferential listening technique, preceded by a familiarization phase, 8-month-olds will be tested for their ability to segment multi-syllabic word-like units from artificial language corpora. These corpora will be brief (2-4 minutes) and will be created by a speech synthesizer to control for the presence (or absence) of acoustic cues to word boundaries. The proposed experiments will examine the relative importance of acoustic and statistical cues to work boundaries, the temporal ordering of statistical cues, the limitations on which statistical cues can be used, and the robustness of statistical cues in long-term memory. These studies on word segmentation, therefore, will not only provide important information about a fundamental aspect of early language acquisition, but they will also serve as a model system for the examination of other aspects of statistical language learning.

该项目的目标是揭示正常人类婴儿在出生后发育的后六个月中如何获得声音结构，这些结构将成为其母语中的单词。早期世界学习的过程发生在婴儿开始在言语中产生单词之前，必须涉及对与单词相对应的流利成人言语的分段。婴儿可能使用声学线索（例如停顿和韵律（例如音调和重音））和分布线索（例如声音序列的统计模式）来解决分词任务。使用优先听力技术，在熟悉阶段之前，将测试 8 个月大的孩子从人工语言语料库中分割多音节词类单元的能力。这些语料库将很简短（2-4 分钟），并将由语音合成器创建，以控制单词边界的声音提示的存在（或不存在）。拟议的实验将检查声学和统计线索对工作边界的相对重要性、统计线索的时间顺序、统计线索的使用限制以及统计线索在长期记忆中的稳健性。因此，这些关于分词的研究不仅将提供有关早期语言习得的基本方面的重要信息，而且还将作为检查统计语言学习其他方面的模型系统。