The role of variability in infants' phonological learning

描述（由申请人提供）：该奖学金的目标是：(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新的语言领域，语音规则概括联系起来；(2)评估相似的机制是否支持单词学习和语音规则概括，这两个语言领域一直被认为是有质的区别的；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两个领域中类似地学习。在单词学习任务中，当婴儿习惯了单词-对象对时，说话者的声音会出现变异性。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循辅音发音规则（例如，前两个音节必须具有相同的发音），元音中引入了变异性。为了研究这两个领域中可变性促进学习的机制，还对每个领域中可变性的分布结构进行了操作；(3)通过让候选人接触新的语言习得主题、分布学习和语音规则学习，以及新的方法、人工语言方法和头部转向偏好程序，为候选人发展新的研究技能；(4)通过在亚利桑那大学的相关机构培训来补充候选人在这些新主题和方法方面的研究训练，包括语音感知、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、语言和听力科学领域的实验室会议、研讨会和座谈会。奖学金培训的这些目标，通过拓宽候选人在语言习得方面的知识，将她的专业知识扩展到新的方法和理论问题，并进一步提高她的出版记录，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授职位的长期职业目标。这项研究对语言治疗有启示意义。目前的语言治疗方法往往不能完全产生临床外的泛化，在治疗过程中提供的语言输入缺乏可变性可能是一个限制因素。识别哪些类型的非标准变异增强了对语音对比和语音规律的注意，可以大大提高语言治疗的效果。特别是，在一个不相关但突出的维度上的可变性可能被用来吸引儿童对相关维度的注意，从而改善学习。

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.