Contributions of infant learning to language acquisition

描述(由申请者提供)：孩子们在一岁生日前后才会说出他们的第一个单词，但通过实验方法进行的研究表明，婴儿在开始说单词之前已经学习了很多关于他们的语言。研究人员现在认为，婴儿在第一年就学会了感知他们语言的语音类别(辅音和元音)，他们学会了识别几十个单词(即使他们不知道这些单词的意思)。这个项目将帮助我们确定这种学习是如何发生的，以及它如何帮助孩子们在第二年的语言学习中取得进一步的进步。该项目首先跟进了研究人员的发现，即即使是6个月大的婴儿也已经知道一些单词的含义；使用最近开发的技术，将有可能区分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起作用。该项目还将支持对婴儿定向语音的声学研究，以及对婴儿如何学习元音的计算模型的测试，该模型始于一种理论，即认字有助于婴儿学习语音类别。第二组实验将测试婴幼儿如何学会辨别发音不同的两个单词何时是不同的单词(如“ten”和“tin”)，以及何时是相同的(如在不同的语言环境中说的“ten”)。因此，该项目将跟踪 从幼儿早期到二年级的语音感知和解释，旨在机械地解释儿童语言习得的第一步。

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.