Perceptual tuning and language acquisition

语言的习得是我们人类最伟大的成就之一。我的研究重点是了解语言习得是如何在婴儿期开始的，早在孩子开始说话，甚至对周围语言的内容--除了情感语调--有任何理解之前。语言习得所需要的一个基本观点是，单词是事物的名称。为了学习事物的名称，婴儿需要建立两种相互关联的类别：1)他们需要知道他们最终要命名的世界中的“事物”的范畴本质和界限是什么；2)他们需要学习可以用来区分他们语言中可能的单词和另一个单词的语音类别(例如，在英语中，“reet”和“leet”是两个可能的不同的单词，因为英语，而不是日语，区分“r”和“L”)。大多数研究人员最多将物体类别和语音类别的习得分开进行研究，这表明，在有单词的情况下，婴儿能够更好地学习物体类别的定义特征(例如，椅子与沙发)。在这项资助中，我建议婴儿同时学习物体类别和语音类别。婴儿不仅能在有单词的情况下更好地学习物体类别，而且当他们听到伴随着不同物体的声音时，他们还能识别出他们语言的语音类别。为了验证这些假设，我们提出了四组使用非侵入性神经成像和行为任务的研究。

The acquisition of language is one of the crowning achievements of our species. My research focuses on understanding how language acquisition begins in infancy, long before the child is speaking or even has any understanding of the content, other than the emotional tone, of the language spoken around them. A fundamental insight that is required for language acquisition is that words are names for things. To learn the names for things, infants need to establish two interlocking kinds of categories: 1) they need to know what the category essences and boundaries are for the "things" in the world they will ultimately name, and 2) they need to learn the speech sound categories that can be used to distinguish one possible word from another in their language (e.g. in English, but not Japanese, "reet" vs. "leet" are two possible distinct words since English, but not Japanese, distinguishes "r" from "l"). Most researchers study the acquisition of object categories and speech sound categories separately, at the most, suggesting that, in the presence of a word, babies are better able to learn the defining features of object categories (e.g. a chair vs. a sofa). In this grant, I propose that babies learn about object categories and speech sound categories in tandem. Not only do babies learn object categories better in the presence of words, but they also figure out the speech sound categories of their language when they hear those sounds accompanied by distinct objects. To test these hypotheses, four sets of studies are proposed using both non-invasive neural imaging and behavioral tasks.