Contributions of infant learning to language acquisition

描述(由申请者提供)：在第一年，婴儿学习他们所听到的周围语言的发音模式(音系学)的特征。婴儿还会学习许多单词的形式。本研究的目的是提供一个经验性的解释，说明在婴儿期获得的知识如何支持语言习得过程。这些研究包括婴幼儿的知觉实验，婴幼儿语音的声学测量和注释，以及婴幼儿语音语料库的计算建模。一些研究测试了儿童在不同条件下对某些语音区别的感知，以及儿童对新单词中语音信息的学习。这些研究利用了最近在早期单词学习和语音感知研究中的方法学进展，包括眼神跟踪技术。计算建模工作使用已知的婴儿知觉来估计婴儿在五种语言中的词形知识。这种词形知识是儿童如何在连续言语中寻找单词的偏见的决定因素，并有助于早期对语言中单词的性质进行概括。正确描述幼儿的语音知识及其在婴儿期是如何产生的，这与听力障碍干预的发展时机有关；它有助于理解早期接受性和产出性词汇的发展；它也揭示了目前关于成功学习阅读的技能和心理表征的争论。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): During their first year, infants learn characteristics of the sound-pattern (phonology) of the language they hear around them. Infants also learn the forms of many words. The goal of the present research is to provide an empirically supported account of how the knowledge gained in infancy supports the language acquisition process. The proposed studies include perceptual experiments with infants and young children, acoustic measurements and annotation of infant-directed speech, and computational modeling of corpora of speech directed to infants. Several studies test children's perception of certain speech sound distinctions under varying conditions and children's learning of phonological information in new words. These studies take advantage of recent methodological advances in research on early word learning and speech perception, including eyetracking techniques. The computational modeling work uses what is known about infant perception to make estimates of infants' word-form knowledge in five languages. This word-form knowledge is a determinant of children's biases in how they find words in continuous speech, and contributes to early generalizations about the nature of words in the language. The effort to properly characterize young children's phonological knowledge and how it arises in infancy is relevant to the developmental timing of intervention for hearing deficits; it informs understanding of early receptive and productive vocabulary development; and it sheds light on current debates concerning the skills and mental representations that underlie successful performance in learning to read.