STATISTICAL LANGUAGE LEARNING IN HUMAN INFANTS

该项目的目标是揭示正常的人类婴儿在出生后六个月的发育过程中是如何获得将成为母语单词的声音结构的。这个早期世界学习的过程，发生在婴儿开始在他们的语言中产生单词之前，必须包括对流利的成人语言中与单词相对应的片段的分割。婴儿可能同时使用声音线索，如停顿和韵律（如音高和重音）和分布线索，如声音序列的统计模式，来解决分词任务。使用优先聆听技术，在熟悉阶段之前，8个月大的婴儿将测试他们从人工语言语料库中分割多音节类词单位的能力。这些语料库将是简短的（2-4分钟），将由语音合成器创建，以控制单词边界的声音线索的存在（或不存在）。本实验将研究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鲁棒性。因此，这些关于分词的研究不仅将提供关于早期语言习得的一个基本方面的重要信息，而且还将作为检验统计语言学习其他方面的模型系统。

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.