Development of spoken word recognition and phoneme awareness in young children

这项拟议的研究计划考察了推动儿童口语识别走向成熟状态的发展机制。成人文学中的口语识别被认为是一个歧视性的过程。语音输入激活听者词典(相似邻域)中所有发音相似的单词，然后单词竞争识别。居住在密集社区(即有许多发音相似的邻居)的单词比居住在稀疏社区的单词识别速度更慢，准确度也更低。词汇表示和词汇组织是基于片段或音素的，这不随单词邻域的大小或信息在单词中的位置而变化。关于儿童早期到中期口语识别的发展情况，我们知之甚少。儿童的词汇量比成年人小，而且更有活力，因为词汇知识在最初的词汇量激增后继续大幅增长。这项拟议的研究计划旨在探索增加邻域密度在推动幼儿口语单词识别中的分段表征、加工和组织方面的作用。增加邻里密度对儿童语音意识能力发展的作用也进行了研究，并包括了一个训练实验来检验这种关系的因果性质。我们考察了密度和音位概率对幼儿口语单词识别和词汇习得的影响，以更好地理解这些影响，并测试是否可以像成人行为数据那样区分每一种影响。这项拟议的研究计划还考察了旨在评估语音表征质量的不同措施是否形成了一个统一的结构，该结构随着时间的推移是稳定的，并预测了语音意识和阅读的增长。这些研究结果有助于更好地理解语言发展及其在阅读习得中的作用，对语言发展和语言障碍、阅读习得和阅读障碍等领域的研究者也有一定的参考价值。

The proposed research program examines the developmental mechanisms which drive children's spoken word recognition toward a mature state. Spoken word recognition in the adult literature is presumed to be a discriminative process. The speech input activates all similarly sounding words in a listener's lexicon (a similarity neighborhood) and words compete for recognition. Words that reside in dense neighborhoods (i.e., have many similarly sounding neighbors) are recognized more slowly and less accurately than those residing in sparse neighborhoods. Lexical representations and lexical organization are based on segments or phonemes, and this does not vary with the size of a word's neighborhood or the position of information within a word. Less is known about the development of spoken word recognition in early through middle childhood. Children's lexicons are smaller than adults and more dynamic as vocabulary knowledge continues to grow substantially past the initial vocabulary growth spurt. The proposed program of research aims to explore the role of increased neighborhood density in driving segmental representation, processing, and organization in young children's spoken word recognition. The role of increasing neighborhood density is also examined in relation to the development of children's phonological awareness abilities, and a training experiment is included to test the causal nature of this relationship. The effects of density and phonotactic probabilities on young children's spoken word recognition and vocabulary acquisition are examined toward a better understanding of these influences and to test if each can be differentiated, as in the adult behavioral data. The proposed program of research also examines whether different measures purporting to evaluate the quality of phonological representations form a unitary construct that is stable over time and predictive of growth in phonological awareness and reading. The findings from the proposed studies have implications for better understanding language development and its role in reading acquisition and will be of interest to those in the fields of language development and impairments, reading acquisition, and reading disabilities.