Infants' use of prosodic cues in language processing

婴儿在语言处理中使用韵律线索

• 批准号: 6755743
• 负责人: AMANDA H SEIDL
• 金额: $ 6.94万
• 依托单位: PURDUE UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2004
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2004-03-01 至 2006-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6755743
• 关键词: behavioral /social science research tag; clinical research; cues; human subject; infant human (0-1 year); language development; neural information processing; sound frequency; speech recognition; syntax

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Two years of support are requested for an investigation of the acoustic properties of speech used by an infant listener to discover the syntactic constituents of his/her language. Infants' use of speech cues for some tasks in language acquisition, for example word segmentation, has been extensively discussed in the literature. However, the use of cues in the acquisition of other units of the grammar such as the clause or phrase, has not been as extensively explored. Nonetheless, there is some evidence indicating that infants are sensitive to the strength of prosodic cues in segmentation of these larger units. For example, it has been shown that infants segment speech more easily when speech is infant-directed and hence is speech that is subject to larger pitch excursions and greater preboundary lengthening. This project has two objectives: (1) to uncover the prosodic cues infants are most sensitive to in continuous speech. (2) To find out which of these cues is most heavily weighted in infants' parsing of the speech stream into large grammatical units such as the clause. The use of cues to segment larger units (clauses and phrases) is particularly important since these units are segmented at a younger age than smaller units, such as the word. The prosodic properties of clauses are larger and more language general than smaller units, thus, they may lay the groundwork for the segmentation of smaller and more language specific units (e.g., words and phrases). Uncovering information about the weighting of cues in this early segmentation will tell us more about how infants go about segmenting these larger units and subsequently smaller units from continuous speech. In addition, segmentation of these units is a key step in language acquisition because so much information about the syntactic structure of the native language (for example, word order) may be gleaned from clauses and phrases. In a series of experiments infants' use of prosodic cues in their segmentation of clauses will be explored. The experiments feature prosodic cues one by one from both clausal and non-clausal units and examine whether infants' performance on segmentation tasks remains the same or worsens as the result of the loss of each cue or group of prosodic cues. In this way, information concerning the perceptual weighting of these cues is elucidated.

描述（由申请人提供）： 请求两年的支持，以调查婴儿听众使用语言的句法成分所用语音的声学特性。 在文献中已经广泛讨论了婴儿在语言获取中使用语音提示在语言获取方面的某些任务。但是，在获取语法的其他单元（例如子句或短语）中，使用提示的使用并未得到广泛的探索。但是，有一些证据表明婴儿在分割这些较大单位时对韵律线索的强度敏感。例如，已经表明，当言语是婴儿指导时，婴儿节段语音更容易，因此，言语会受到更大的音调偏移和更大的延长。 该项目有两个目标：（1）揭示韵律提示婴儿在连续的语音中最敏感。 （2）找出这些提示中的哪些提示在婴儿对语音流的解析中最大的加权分为大型语法单元，例如条款。使用提示来细分较大的单元（条款和短语）尤为重要，因为这些单元在年轻的年龄中比较小的单元（例如单词）进行了细分。等级的韵律属性比较小的单位更大，语言更一般，因此，它们可能为较小和更语言的单元（例如单词和短语）的细分奠定基础。在这种早期细分中发现有关提示的加权的信息将告诉我们更多有关婴儿如何从连续语音中分割这些较大单位以及随后较小的单位的信息。此外，这些单元的分割是语言获取的关键步骤，因为有关母语的句法结构的大量信息（例如，单词顺序）可以从子句和短语中收集。 在一系列实验中，将探讨婴儿对韵律线索的使用。该实验以韵律线索为特定，从clausal和非顾问单元中一一偏，并检查婴儿在分割任务上的表现是否保持相同或由于每个提示或一组韵律提示而导致的结果。这样，就阐明了有关这些提示感知权重的信息。