The role of variability in infants' phonological learning

变异性在婴儿语音学习中的作用

• 批准号: 8479631
• 负责人: Carolyn Marie Quam
• 金额: $ 4.92万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-08-01 至 2014-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8479631
• 关键词: Acoustics; Address; Affect; Arizona; Attention; Categories; Characteristics; Child; Clinic; Cognitive Science; Cues; Dimensions; Educational process of instructing; Ethics; Fellowship; Goals; Head; Hearing; Home environment; Infant; Investigation; Knowledge; Laboratory Research; Language; Language Development; Learning; Linguistics; Literature; Methodology; Methods; Pattern; Procedures; Psycholinguistics; Psychology; Publications; Research; Research Training; Role; Science; Secure; Series; Speech; Speech Perception; Speech Therapy; Statistical Distributions; Structure; Time; Training; Universities; Variant; Voice; Work; career; improved; meetings; phonology; preference; relating to nervous system; skills; sound; statistics

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goals for this fellowship are: (1) to relate the candidate's existing research training in word learning and sound-category learning to a new linguistic domain, phonological-rule generalization; (2) to evaluate whether similar mechanisms support word learning and phonological-rule generalization, two linguistic domains that have been argued to be qualitatively distinct; in particular, to evaluate whether variability on a dimension irrelevant to the learning task facilitates learning analogously in the two domains. In the word- learning task, variability is introduced in the talkers' voices when infants are habituated to the word-object pairs. In the phonological-rule learning task, infants are familiarized to a language in which 3-syllable words obey a consonant-voicing rule (e.g., the 1st 2 syllables must have the same voicing), and variability is introduced in the vowels. To investigate the mechanism by which variability facilitates learning in the two domains, the distributional structure of the variability in each domain is also manipulated; (3) to develop new research skills for the candidate by exposing her to new language-acquisition topics, distributional learning and phonological-rule learning, and new methodologies, artificial-language methods and the head-turn preference procedure; and (4) to supplement the candidate's research training in these new topics and methods with relevant institutional training at the University of Arizona, both through pertinent courses in speech perception, statistics, and ethics, and active participation in lab meetings, seminars, and colloquia across Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. These goals for the fellowship training, by broadening the candidate's knowledge of language acquisition, expanding her expertise to new methods and theoretical questions, and furthering her publication record, will support her long-term career goals of establishing her own research laboratory and securing a tenure-track professorship at a research university. The proposed research has implications for speech therapy. Current speech therapy methods often fail to fully yield of out-of-clinic generalization, and lack of variability in the speech input provided during therapy may be one limiting factor. Identifying what types of noncriterial variability enhance attention to phonological contrasts and phonological regularities could greatly improve the efficacy of speech therapy. In particular, variability on an irrelevant but salient dimension could potentially be used to draw children's attention to the relevant dimension, improving learning.

描述(申请人提供)：此奖学金的目标是：(1)将候选人在单词学习和声音类别学习方面的现有研究训练与一个新的语言领域--语音规则概括--联系起来；(2)评估类似的机制是否支持单词学习和语音规则概括，这两个语言领域被认为是定性不同的；特别是评估与学习任务无关的维度上的可变性是否有助于在这两个领域进行类似的学习。在单词学习任务中，当婴儿习惯于词-物对时，说话者的声音中引入了可变性。在语音规则学习任务中，婴儿熟悉一种语言，其中三个音节的单词遵守辅音发音规则(例如，前两个音节必须有相同的发音)，并在元音中引入可变性。为了探讨变异性促进这两个领域学习的机制，还操纵了变异性在每个领域的分布结构：(3)通过让应试者接触到新的语言习得主题、分布学习和语音规则学习、新的方法、人工语言方法和转向偏好程序，为应试者培养新的研究技能；以及(4)在亚利桑那大学，通过言语感知、统计学和伦理学的相关课程，以及积极参加心理学、认知科学、言语、语言和听力科学的实验室会议、研讨会和座谈，来补充候选人在这些新主题和方法方面的研究培训。这些奖学金培训的目标，通过扩大候选人的语言习得知识，扩大她在新方法和理论问题上的专业知识，以及促进她的出版记录，将支持她建立自己的研究实验室和在研究型大学获得终身教职的长期职业目标。这项拟议的研究对言语治疗具有重要意义。目前的语音治疗方法往往不能完全得到临床外的推广，在治疗过程中提供的语音输入缺乏可变性可能是一个限制因素。识别哪种类型的非标准变异性，加强对语音对比和语音规律的注意，可以极大地提高言语治疗的效果。特别是，一个不相关但显著的维度上的可变性可能会被用来吸引儿童对相关维度的注意，从而改善学习。