Contributions of infant learning to language acquisition

婴儿学习对语言习得的贡献

• 批准号: 8467333
• 负责人: DANIEL SWINGLEY
• 金额: $ 35.73万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-08-21 至 2017-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8467333
• 关键词: 2 year old; Accounting; Acoustics; Address; Adult; Awareness; Categories; Child; Complement; Computer Simulation; Detection; Development; Disease; Educational process of instructing; Environment; Event; Goals; Grant; Hearing; Individual Differences; Infant; Intuition; Knowledge; Label; Language; Language Delays; Language Development; Learning; Light; Linguistics; Link; Mental Processes; Methods; Modeling; Mothers; Outcome; Participant; Perception; Philadelphia; Phonetics; Population; Reading; Research; Research Personnel; Signal Transduction; Socioeconomic Status; Sorting - Cell Movement; Source; Speech; Speech Perception; Speech Sound; Structure; Sum; System; Techniques; Testing; Time; Tin; Toddler; Training; Variant; Work; abstracting; base; hearing impairment; heuristics; infancy; interest; language perception; lexical; novel; phonology; public health relevance; research study; skills; sound; theories; visual stimulus

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children don't say their first words until around the time of their first birthday, but research using experimental methods has shown that infants learn a great deal about their language before they start saying words. Researchers now believe that infants learn to perceive their language's speech sound categories (consonants and vowels) in the first year, and they learn to recognize dozens of words (even if they don't know what they mean). This project will help us determine how this learning happens, and how it helps children make further progress in language learning over the second year. The project begins by following up on the investigator's discovery that even infants as young as 6 months already know what some words mean; using recently developed techniques, it will be possible to tell whether infants learn abstract words as well as more concrete ones, and what kinds of learning mechanisms may be responsible. The project will also support study of the acoustics of infant-directed speech and testing of computational models of how infants might learn vowels, starting from a theory stating that knowing words helps infants learn speech sound categories. A second set of experiments will test how infants and toddlers learn to tell when two different-sounding words really are different words (like "ten" and "tin") and when they are the same (like "ten" spoken in different linguistic environments). Thus, the project will trace the development of speech sound perception and interpretation from early infancy into the second year, aiming for mechanistic explanations of the child's first steps in language acquisition.

描述（由申请人提供）：孩子们直到第一个生日左右才说出他们的第一个单词，但是使用实验方法的研究表明，婴儿在开始说单词之前就对他们的语言学习了很多东西。研究人员现在认为，婴儿学会在第一年就可以感知其语言的语音类别（辅音和元音），并且他们学会了识别数十种单词（即使他们不知道自己的意思）。该项目将帮助我们确定这种学习的发生方式，以及如何帮助孩子在第二年的语言学习方面取得进一步的进步。该项目首先要跟踪调查人员的发现，即即使是6个月的婴儿，也已经知道一些单词的含义。使用最近开发的技术，可以判断婴儿是否学习抽象单词以及更具体的单词，以及哪种学习机制可能是负责的。该项目还将支持对婴儿指导语音的声学的研究以及婴儿如何学习元音的计算模型的测试，这是从理论开始的，该理论说，知道单词可以帮助婴儿学习语音类别。第二组实验将测试婴儿和幼儿如何学会何时何时两个不同的单词确实是不同的单词（例如“十”和“ tin”），以及它们何时相同（例如在不同的语言环境中使用的“十”）。因此，该项目将追踪 语音声音的看法和解释从婴儿早期到第二年，旨在对孩子的语言获取第一步进行机械解释。