Contributions of infant learning to language acquisition

描述（由申请人提供）：在他们的第一年，婴儿学习他们周围听到的语言的声音模式（语音）的特征。婴儿也学习许多单词的形式。本研究的目的是提供一个经验支持的帐户如何在婴儿期获得的知识支持语言习得过程。拟议的研究包括感知实验与婴儿和幼儿，声学测量和注释的婴儿导向的语音，和计算建模语料库的语音导向婴儿。有几项研究测试了儿童在不同条件下对某些语音区别的感知，以及儿童对新单词中语音信息的学习。这些研究利用了早期单词学习和言语感知研究的最新方法学进展，包括眼动追踪技术。计算建模工作使用已知的婴儿感知来估计婴儿在五种语言中的单词形式知识。这种词的形式知识是儿童在连续语音中如何找到单词的偏见的决定因素，并有助于早期对语言中单词的性质进行概括。努力正确描述幼儿的语音知识，以及它是如何出现在婴儿期的听力障碍的干预发展的时机有关;它通知理解早期的接受性和生产性词汇的发展;它揭示了当前的辩论有关的技能和心理表征的基础上成功学习阅读。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): During their first year, infants learn characteristics of the sound-pattern (phonology) of the language they hear around them. Infants also learn the forms of many words. The goal of the present research is to provide an empirically supported account of how the knowledge gained in infancy supports the language acquisition process. The proposed studies include perceptual experiments with infants and young children, acoustic measurements and annotation of infant-directed speech, and computational modeling of corpora of speech directed to infants. Several studies test children's perception of certain speech sound distinctions under varying conditions and children's learning of phonological information in new words. These studies take advantage of recent methodological advances in research on early word learning and speech perception, including eyetracking techniques. The computational modeling work uses what is known about infant perception to make estimates of infants' word-form knowledge in five languages. This word-form knowledge is a determinant of children's biases in how they find words in continuous speech, and contributes to early generalizations about the nature of words in the language. The effort to properly characterize young children's phonological knowledge and how it arises in infancy is relevant to the developmental timing of intervention for hearing deficits; it informs understanding of early receptive and productive vocabulary development; and it sheds light on current debates concerning the skills and mental representations that underlie successful performance in learning to read.