Bilingual Speech Segmentation

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究的目的是深入了解语言学习者在接触多种语言时如何能够形成多种表征。先前的研究与这种能力的年龄存在冲突（参见Sebastian-Galles & Kroll， 2003）。拟议的调查将涵盖婴儿和成人学习者，以了解10个月大的婴儿是否有能力形成多种表征，以及在发展过程中是否有处理变化。以往关于双语语言习得发展的知觉研究通常集中在婴儿区分两种不同语言的能力上。本文提出的研究采用了语音流分割任务，更直接地评估听者是否有能力形成多个表征。具体来说，实验的设计要求参与者必须对两种人工“语言”形成单独的表征，以便正确解析语言并正确识别“单词”。因此，本研究也解决了统计学习文献的一个关键问题。也就是说，语言学习者如何正确地分割来自多种语言的输入？如果跨语言组合统计数据，可能会出现两种语言的不正确分割。本研究的第二个目标是研究可能促进多重表征形成的声音线索。语言学习者可能会面临一项困难的任务，即试图确定他们何时处于多种语言中。因此，学习者的任务是识别表示语言变化的相关特征。在提出的实验中，一系列线索将被操纵，以确定哪些特征可能对提示语言学习者多种语言的存在有用。总之，本研究将填补双语语言习得和统计学习方面的空白。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this research is to gain insight into how language learners are able to form multiple representations when exposed to more than one language. Previous research has conflicted with respect to the age at which this ability is present (see Sebastian-Galles & Kroll, 2003). The proposed investigation will span infant and adult learners in order to understand whether the ability to form multiple representations is available to infants at 10 months of age and whether there are changes in processing over the course of development. Previous perceptual research investigating the development of bilingual language acquisition has typically focused on infants' abilities to discriminate between two different languages. The research proposed here employs a speech stream segmentation task that more directly assesses whether listeners are capable of forming multiple representations. Specifically, the experiments are designed such that participants must form separate representations for 2 artificial "languages" in order to correctly parse the languages and correctly identify the "words". Thus, this research also addresses a critical problem for the statistical learning literature. Namely, how can language learners correctly segment the input from multiple languages? If the statistics are combined across languages, incorrect segmentation of both languages could occur. A second goal of this research is to investigate the acoustic cues that may facilitate the formation of multiple representations. Language learners may face a difficult task of trying to determine when they are in the presence of multiple languages. Therefore, the task of the learner is to identify relevant features that denote a language change. In the proposed experiments, a series of cues will be manipulated in an effort to determine which features may be useful for cuing language learners to the presence of multiple languages. In sum, the proposed research will fill gaps in current knowledge regarding both bilingual language acquisition as well as statistical learning.