Constraints on Phonological and Morphological Development

语音和形态发展的限制

• 批准号: 7874624
• 负责人: KATHERINE A DEMUTH
• 金额: $ 31.38万
• 依托单位: BROWN UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-06-01 至 2010-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7874624
• 关键词: 2 year old; Acoustics; Address; Adult; Case Study; Categories; Child; Cues; Databases; Development; Developmental Process; Diagnosis; Ensure; Foundations; Frequencies; Genetic Transcription; Gestures; Goals; Hylobates Genus; Impairment; Individual; Intervention; Knowledge; Language; Length; Link; Masks; Measures; Methods; Modeling; Morphology; Neighborhoods; Parents; Pattern; Persons; Phonetics; Population; Positioning Attribute; Process; Production; Research; Shapes; Signal Transduction; Speech; Staging; Structure; Testing; Time; Variant; Voice; Work; base; contextual factors; density; design; diagnosis design; insight; lexical; novel strategies; phonology; public health relevance; research study; tool

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children's early word productions are often inconsistent in form, showing apparent between-speaker and within-speaker variability in phonological and morphological shape. Recent results show more adult-like productions in certain contexts, suggesting that children's phonological and morphological representations are more robust than often assumed. Previous acoustic/phonetic studies have also shown that children sometimes make systematic acoustic or gestural feature contrasts not perceived as such by adults (covert contrasts). However, research on such covert contrast has been limited to a few case studies. Little is therefore known about the extent of these processes across young, normally developing learners, nor about how this relates to early variability in natural speech. This proposal addresses this problem by using acoustic and articulatory measures to test the hypothesis that many of children's early phonological and morphological representations are more adult-like than they appear. To investigate this issue we draw on recent theoretical and empirical work on adult speech, where variability in production has been analyzed in terms of individual acoustic/articulatory cues to grammatical feature contrasts. However, most of this research to date has focused on the beginnings of words (onsets): very little is known about how adults or children produce contrasts at the ends of words, where languages like English encode important grammatical morphemes. We therefore extend and compare previous findings to the acoustic/phonetics of child- directed speech (by adults) and to child speech, focusing on the question of when and how children acquire word-final (coda) consonants. To do this we first carry out detailed acoustic analyses of existing adult and child speech corpora, focusing on the production of simple non-inflected and inflected words (e.g., dig, digs). We then compare these results with those of 2-year-old's speech productions under more controlled experimental conditions. The goal is to better understand the principles that underlie phonological and morphological variation in child speech. We hypothesize that between-speaker variability will occur most often for feature contrasts that are signaled by multiple articulatory gestures and acoustic cues (e.g., the voicing of word-final consonants), where developing speakers may initially implement different feature cues. In contrast, we hypothesize that within- speaker variability will be highly predictable and context dependent (e.g., sensitive to word complexity and position within the utterance), reflecting constraints on phonological form. The results will provide a framework for better understanding children's early knowledge of phonological and morphological structure, and will lay the foundation for a developmental model of language planning. This will have implications for more accurate diagnosis and design of interventions for both child and adult populations with language impairments. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The findings from this research will reveal much about the structure of children's early phonological and morphological representations, and how these develop over time. In so doing, they will provide insight into the mechanisms underlying variability in children's productions, and the possible impact of input, complexity and contextual factors in understanding between-speaker and within-speaker variability in language production. These findings will lay the foundation for constructing a developmental model of language planning, providing a framework for designing more effective tools for diagnosing and treating aspects of language impairment.

描述（由申请人提供）：儿童早期的词语产出在形式上往往不一致，在语音和形态上表现出明显的说话者之间和说话者内部的差异。最近的研究结果显示，在某些情况下，儿童的语音和形态表征比通常认为的更强大。先前的声学/语音研究也表明，儿童有时会做出成人无法感知的系统性声学或手势特征对比（隐蔽对比）。然而，对这种隐蔽对比的研究仅限于少数案例研究。因此，我们对正常发育的年轻学习者的这些过程的程度知之甚少，也不知道这与自然语言的早期变异有什么关系。这个建议解决了这个问题，通过使用声学和发音测量来测试许多儿童早期的语音和形态表征比他们看起来更像成年人的假设。为了研究这一问题，我们借鉴了最近关于成人言语的理论和实证工作，其中从个体声学/发音线索到语法特征对比的角度分析了生产中的变异性。然而，到目前为止，大多数研究都集中在单词的开头（onsets）上：对于成人或儿童如何在单词的末尾产生对比，我们知之甚少，而像英语这样的语言在单词的末尾编码重要的语法语素。因此，我们将先前的研究结果扩展并比较到儿童（成人）定向语音和儿童语音的声学/语音，重点关注儿童何时以及如何获得词尾（尾）辅音的问题。为此，我们首先对现有的成人和儿童语音语料库进行了详细的声学分析，重点关注简单的非屈折词和屈折词（例如，dig, digs）的产生。然后，我们将这些结果与两岁儿童在更严格的实验条件下的语言产生结果进行比较。目的是更好地理解儿童言语中语音和形态变化的基本原理。我们假设，说话者之间的差异最常发生在特征对比中，这些特征对比是由多个发音手势和声音线索（例如，单词结尾辅音的发音）发出的，其中发展中的说话者最初可能会实施不同的特征线索。相比之下，我们假设说话者内部的变化将是高度可预测的，并且依赖于语境（例如，对单词复杂性和话语中的位置敏感），反映了语音形式的限制。研究结果将为更好地理解儿童早期的语音和形态结构知识提供一个框架，并将为语言规划的发展模型奠定基础。这将对儿童和成人语言障碍人群的更准确诊断和干预设计产生影响。公共卫生相关性：这项研究的结果将揭示儿童早期语音和形态表征的结构，以及它们如何随着时间的推移而发展。在这样做的过程中，他们将深入了解儿童作品变异性的潜在机制，以及输入、复杂性和上下文因素对理解说话者之间和说话者内部语言生产变异性的可能影响。这些发现将为构建语言规划的发展模型奠定基础，为设计更有效的语言障碍诊断和治疗工具提供框架。