Infant vocalization and the foundations for speech

描述(由申请人提供)：早在第一年的中期，当规范的喋喋不休开始时，人类婴儿发声的方式表明出现了关键的语言能力。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中。然而，个别规范前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，但其他可识别的典范前声音似乎是由婴儿以特定声音的重复模式和婴儿舒适地独处时声音之间的系统交替模式产生的中性影响。在其他时候，同样的声音似乎也会被用来表达，既有负面影响，也有正面影响。此外，在其他情况下，相同的声音可以通过伴随发声的眼神接触来指示交互中的成年人。这种在各种语境中发出特定声音的自由似乎表明了言论的主要基础的出现。然而，科学没有提供这种发声灵活性的出现的量化特征，也没有提供婴儿系统地交流状态和意图的方式，尽管发声灵活，通过在面部情感、手势和/或交互序列的可靠可识别的上下文中持续使用其他更稳定的声音或声音特征。在我们对规范前婴儿发声及其在言语基础中的作用的理解上，我们不再有能力弥合这一鸿沟。剩下的是通过对发声和发声发生的丰富背景进行深入的声学、听觉和视觉分析来填补经验空白，这些分析基于人类婴儿的纵向记录，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语音交流是如何通过在上下文中一致使用某些声音来完成的，同时评估在婴儿时期灵活使用不断增长的声乐曲目可以形成语音基础的方法。在一定程度上，规范前范畴的使用是可以量化的，这可能为早期识别交流障碍奠定基础。

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.