DEVELOPMENT OF SPEECH PERCEPTION CAPACITIES

提出了一系列的实验来研究基本的 婴儿的言语感知能力以及这些能力在 学习母语。在发展过程中， 语音处理能力变得适应特定的组织， 母语的声音模式，以提供快速和有效的识别， 用流利的语言表达。因此，拟议研究的一个目的是 对婴儿编码的语音信息有一个更清晰的了解， 记得了需要对婴儿的语言记忆能力进行更全面的研究 了解单词学习的基本过程和 词典。一些拟议的研究审查了 婴儿保留的关于语言的信息及其对 词汇的发展和组织。调查人员一直在探索 婴儿使用他们不断增长的母语声音模式知识， 从流利的语音中切分单词。因此，第二个目标是确定潜在的 提示婴儿在处理流利语音时使用的词边界， 调查婴儿如何以及何时整合各种可用的线索 给他们.更清楚地了解婴儿所感知的词语的本质， 从流利的语音编码将有助于理解他们如何开始 发现母语话语的句法组织。比如说， 对某些语法词素位置的敏感性 在话语中可以为学习者提供有关句法的线索 organization.该实验室以前的研究表明，婴儿 对话语的韵律标记敏感。因此，第三个主要目标是 建议研究如何将这种对韵律的敏感性与其他 语音信号中的信息，如语法的出现， 词素，以帮助学习者在句法组织的发现， 他们的母语。

A series of experiments is proposed to investigate the basic speech perception capacities of infants and the role of these capacities in acquiring a native language. During the course of development, speech-processing capacities become adapted to the specific organization of native language sound patterns to provide fast and efficient recognition of words in fluent speech. Accordingly, one aim of the proposed research is to develop a clearer picture of the speech information that infants encode and remember. A fuller account of infants' memory capacities for speech is required to understand processes underlying word learning and the development of a lexicon. A number of the proposed studies examine the nature and extent of information that infants retain about speech and the implications this has for the growth and organization of a lexicon. The investigator has been exploring infants' use of their growing knowledge of native language sounds patterns to segment words from fluent speech. Thus, a second aim is to identify potential cues to word boundaries used by infants in processing fluent speech and to investigate how and when infants integrate the various cues that are available to them. A clearer picture of the nature of the words that infants detect and encode from fluent speech will be useful in understanding how they begin to discover the syntactic organization of native language utterances. For example, sensitivity to the occurrence of positioning of certain grammatical morphemes in utterances could provide the learner with clues about syntactic organization. Previous research from this laboratory has shown that infants are sensitive to the prosodic marking of utterances. Thus, a third major aim of the proposed research how this sensitivity to prosody might be used with other information in the speech signal, such as the occurrence of grammatical morphemes to aid learners in the discovery of the syntactic organization of their native language.