Infants' use of prosodic cues in language processing

描述（由申请人提供）： 两年的支持，要求调查的声学特性的语音使用的婴儿听众发现他/她的语言的句法成分。 婴儿在语言习得的某些任务中使用言语线索，例如分词，在文献中已经被广泛讨论。然而，在习得其他语法单位（如小句或短语）时，线索的使用还没有得到广泛的探讨。尽管如此，有一些证据表明，婴儿是敏感的强度韵律线索分割这些较大的单位。例如，已经表明，当语音是婴儿引导的并且因此是经受较大音高偏移和较大前边界延长的语音时，婴儿更容易分割语音。 本研究有两个目的：（1）揭示婴儿在连续语音中最敏感的韵律线索。(2)为了找出这些线索中的哪一个在婴儿将语音流解析成大的语法单位（如小句）时权重最大。使用线索来分割较大的单元（从句和短语）是特别重要的，因为这些单元比较小的单元（如单词）在更小的年龄被分割。小句的韵律属性比较小的单元更大并且更具有语言通用性，因此，它们可以为更小和更具有语言特定性的单元（例如，单词和短语）。揭示早期分割中线索权重的信息，将告诉我们更多关于婴儿如何从连续语音中分割这些较大的单元和随后的较小单元的信息。此外，这些单位的分割是语言习得中的关键步骤，因为关于母语的句法结构（例如，词序）的大量信息可以从分句和短语中收集。 在一系列的实验中，婴儿使用韵律线索在他们的分割分句将被探索。实验的特点是韵律线索一个接一个从小句和非小句单位，并检查是否婴儿的分割任务的性能保持不变或作为一个结果的损失的每个线索或组的韵律线索。以这种方式，关于这些线索的感知加权的信息被阐明。

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.