The Development of Native Language Speech Perception

母语语音感知的发展

• 批准号: 7193411
• 负责人: JESSICA C MAYE
• 金额: $ 7.33万
• 依托单位: NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-08-01 至 2009-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7193411
• 关键词: Affect; Age; Algorithms; Brain; Categories; Cereals; Data; Development; Discrimination; Exposure to; Familiarity; Foundations; Frequencies; Human; Individual; Infant; Instruction; Japanese Population; Knowledge; Language; Language Disorders; Lead; Learning; Licensing; Linguistics; Methods; Perception; Phonetics; Process; Property; Research; Speech Perception; Structure; System; Time; base; design; infancy; language processing; programs; research study; sound; speech recognition

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This research aims to characterize the process by which exposure to the native language results in changes in infants' perception of speech. Properties of the native language sound system affect listeners' perception of speech, a phenomenon that begins during infancy. The proposed studies will form the basis of a research program investigating the interaction of phonetic and phonotactic information in infants' developing language processing system. Experiments 1 and 2 examine the development of familiarity with native language phonetic categories. Experiment 1 asks at what age infants recognize a set of phonetic categories that occur in their language in comparison with phonetic categories that do not occur in the language. Experiment 2 asks the more fine-grained question of whether this developing sensitivity is also present for within-language categories; namely, are infants sensitive to the difference between phonetic categories that occur frequently in their language versus categories that occur with low frequency in their language? Experiments 3 and 4 examine the time course with which infants' developing phonotactic system affects their discrimination of phonetic contrasts. Both experiments compare infants from different language backgrounds (Exp 3, English vs. Japanese; Exp 4, English vs. Spanish) on their discrimination of contrasts that are phonotactically licensed in only one of the two languages. The proposed research is designed to lay the groundwork for a research program examining the interaction of phonetic and phonotactic development. Previous research suggests that both of these aspects of perceptual/linguistic development might arise on the basis of a single computation - a context-specific phonetic learning algorithm. However, before embarking on this research program it is necessary to flesh out our knowledge of the basic time course of development. This data will in turn inform our understanding of the mechanism by which infants' perception becomes attuned to the native language, which provides a foundation from which infants can begin to learn words and grammar. This process exemplifies the ability of the human brain to find structure in the gace of highly variable and noisy input. A fuller understanding of how learners accomplish such a feat may ulitmately lead to advances in the treatment of individuals with disordered language, to more successful methods for second-language instruction, and to the development of better speech recognition systems.

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究旨在描述接触母语导致婴儿言语感知变化的过程。母语声音系统的特性会影响听众对言语的感知，这种现象从婴儿期就开始了。拟议的研究将构成一项研究计划的基础，该研究计划调查婴儿正在发育的语言处理系统中语音和语音信息的相互作用。 实验 1 和 2 检查对母语语音类别的熟悉程度。实验 1 询问婴儿在什么年龄能够识别出其语言中出现的一组语音类别，并与该语言中未出现的语音类别进行比较。实验 2 提出了更细粒度的问题：这种发展中的敏感性是否也存在于语言内类别中？也就是说，婴儿对语言中频繁出现的语音类别与语言中出现频率较低的语音类别之间的差异是否敏感？实验 3 和 4 检查了婴儿发育中的趋音系统影响其语音对比辨别的时间过程。这两项实验都比较了来自不同语言背景（Exp 3，英语与日语；Exp 4，英语与西班牙语）的婴儿对仅在两种语言中的一种语音策略许可的对比的辨别能力。 拟议的研究旨在为检查语音和语音发展相互作用的研究计划奠定基础。先前的研究表明，感知/语言发展的这两个方面都可能基于单一计算——特定于上下文的语音学习算法。 然而，在开始这项研究计划之前，有必要充实我们对发展的基本时间过程的了解。这些数据反过来将帮助我们理解婴儿的感知与母语相协调的机制，这为婴儿开始学习单词和语法奠定了基础。这个过程体现了人类大脑在高度可变和嘈杂的输入中寻找结构的能力。更全面地了解学习者如何完成这一壮举最终可能会导致语言障碍患者的治疗取得进展，带来更成功的第二语言教学方法，并开发出更好的语音识别系统。