Infant vocalization and the foundations for speech

描述（由申请人提供）：早在一岁中期之前，当规范的咿呀学语开始时，人类婴儿就开始以各种方式发声，表现出语言的关键能力。这些发声模式的重要方面似乎很少出现在任何非人类灵长类动物身上。然而，个体前规范发声类型的使用模式还没有被清楚地描述和量化。例如，虽然一些婴儿的声音（或声音的特征）似乎具有相当一致的功能，但其他可识别的前规范声音似乎是由婴儿在重复特定声音的模式中产生的，并且在婴儿舒适地独处时，在声音之间有系统的交替模式中产生。在其他时候，同样的声音似乎被用来表达消极或积极的影响。此外，在其他情况下，同样的声音也可以通过伴随着发声的眼神交流来指示成年人。这种在各种环境中发出特定声音的自由似乎表明了语言的基本基础的出现。尽管如此，科学还没有提供这种发声灵活性的量化特征，也没有提供婴儿系统地交流状态和意图的方式，尽管声音具有灵活性，但通过在可靠可识别的面部表情、手势和/或互动序列的环境中持续使用其他更稳定的声音或声音特征。在我们对前规范婴儿发声及其在语言基础中的作用的理解中，弥合这一鸿沟已不再超出我们的能力范围。剩下的就是通过对发声进行密集的声学、听觉和视觉分析，以及基于人类婴儿纵向记录的丰富背景来填补经验空白，对少数婴儿进行密集采样和声学分析，主要集中在2至7个月大的时期。这项工作旨在评估婴儿早期的声音交流是如何通过在上下文中一致使用一些声音来完成的，同时评估婴儿时期不断增长的声音曲目的灵活使用可以形成语言基础的方式。在某种程度上，前规范类别的使用可以量化，它可能为早期识别沟通障碍奠定基础。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Well before the middle of the first year of life when canonical babbling begins, the human infant vocalizes in ways that manifest the emergence of critical capabilities for speech. Important aspects of these patterns of vocalization appear to occur rarely if ever in any non-human primate. Yet the patterns of usage of individual precanonical vocalization types have not been clearly delineated and quantified. For example, while some infant sounds (or features of sounds) appear to be used with fairly consistent functions, other identifiable precanonical sounds appear to be produced with neutral affect by infants in patterns of repetition of particular sounds and in patterns of systematic alternation among the sounds when infants are comfortably alone. The very same sounds appear to be used expressively with either negative or positive affect at other times. Further, the same sounds may on other occasions be directed to adults in interaction as indicated by eye contact accompanying the vocalizations. This sort of freedom to produce particular sounds in a variety of contexts appears to indicate the emergence of a primary foundation for speech. Still, science has provided no quantified characterization of the emergence of this flexibility of vocalization, nor of the ways that infants systematically communicate states and intentions, in spite of the vocal flexibility, through consistent usage of other more stable sounds or features of sounds in reliably identifiable contexts of facial affect, gesture, and/or interactive sequence. It is no longer beyond our capability to bridge this chasm in our understanding of precanonical infant vocalizations and their role in the foundations of speech. What remains is to fill the empirical void through intensive acoustic, auditory and visual analysis of vocalizations and the rich context in which they occur based on longitudinal recordings from human infants with intensive sampling and acoustic analysis on a small number of infants with a primary focus on the period from 2 to 7 months of age. The work is designed to evaluate how vocal communication in early infancy is accomplished through consistent usage of some sounds in context, and at the same time to assess ways that the flexible usage of a growing vocal repertoire in infancy can form a basis for speech. To the extent that precanonical category usage can be quantified, it may lay the foundations for early identification of disorders of communication.