The Development of Native Language Speech Perception

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究旨在描述接触母语导致婴儿语言感知变化的过程。母语声音系统的特性会影响听者对言语的感知，这种现象从婴儿时期就开始了。本研究将为研究幼儿语言处理系统中语音和语音趋位信息的相互作用奠定基础。实验1和2考察了母语语音类别熟悉程度的发展。实验1问婴儿在什么年龄时能认出在他们的语言中出现的一组语音类别，与在语言中不出现的语音类别相比较。实验2提出了一个更细致的问题，即这种发展中的敏感性是否也存在于语言类别中；也就是说，婴儿对他们语言中频繁出现的语音类别和他们语言中低频率出现的语音类别之间的差异是否敏感？实验3和实验4考察了幼儿语音定向系统发育对其语音对比辨别的影响。两个实验比较了来自不同语言背景的婴儿（实验3，英语与日语；实验4，英语与西班牙语）对两种语言中只有一种语音上存在的对比的辨别能力。这项研究的目的是为研究语音和语音致音发展的相互作用奠定基础。先前的研究表明，感知/语言发展的这两个方面可能都是基于一个单一的计算——一个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进程的认识。这些数据将反过来帮助我们理解婴儿感知与母语相适应的机制，这为婴儿开始学习单词和语法提供了基础。这个过程证明了人类大脑在高度可变和嘈杂的输入中发现结构的能力。更全面地了解学习者是如何完成这一壮举的，可能最终导致对语言障碍患者的治疗取得进展，产生更成功的第二语言教学方法，以及开发更好的语音识别系统。

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.