Infant vocalization and the foundations for speech

婴儿发声和言语的基础

• 批准号: 7150038
• 负责人: D. KIMBROUGH OLLER
• 金额: $ 38.68万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2003
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2003-12-01 至 2008-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7150038
• 关键词: Infant; vocalization; foundations; speech

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.

描述（由申请人提供）：在一岁中期之前，当典型的咿呀学语开始时，人类婴儿以表现出言语关键能力出现的方式发声。这些发声模式的重要方面似乎很少发生在任何非人类灵长类动物中。然而，个别的前规范发声类型的使用模式还没有明确的划定和量化。例如，有些婴儿的声音（或声音的特征）似乎具有相当一致的功能，而其他可识别的前典型声音似乎是由婴儿以重复特定声音的模式和当婴儿舒适地独处时声音之间的系统交替模式产生的。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，相同的声音可以在其他场合被引导到如伴随发声的目光接触所指示的交互中的成年人。这种在各种语境中产生特定声音的自由似乎表明了言语的主要基础的出现。尽管如此，科学并没有提供量化的特征来描述这种发声的灵活性的出现，也没有提供婴儿系统地传达状态和意图的方式，尽管声音的灵活性，通过在可靠的可识别的面部表情，手势和/或互动序列的背景下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言语基础中的作用的理解中，弥合这一鸿沟不再超出我们的能力。剩下的就是通过对发声的密集声学、听觉和视觉分析以及发声发生的丰富背景来填补经验空白，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，主要关注2至7个月大的婴儿。这项工作的目的是评估如何在婴儿早期的语音通信是通过一致使用的一些声音在上下文中完成的，并在同一时间，以评估的方式，灵活使用的一个不断增长的声乐曲目在婴儿期可以形成语音的基础。在某种程度上，前规范类别的使用可以量化，它可能奠定了基础，早期识别障碍的沟通。