Learning of sound sequences by infants and adults

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

To understand how language is learned and used we must understand how language representations are formed, the information contained in those representations, and how we appropriately extract information from them. My research program focuses on how we become competent language users; within this broader aim, the current proposal explores the formation and content of representations of speech sounds. The particular aspect of speech sounds that we have been examining is knowledge of how they are ordered. In English, the "ng" sound (at the end of "sing") never appears at the beginning of a word. This type of existing regularity affects how we process speech: sound sequences are more easily processed when they follow existing regularities (e.g., "fing" would make a reasonable English word) than when the regularities are violated (e.g., "ngif" would make a poor word). To study the formation and content of representations we expose adults and infants to novel sequence regularities, for example, restricting "f"s to the beginnings of syllables. We then test whether they treat syllables that begin with "f" and end with "f" differently. If they do, it suggests that they learned about the new regularities. Languages differ in how sounds can be ordered and they also differ in the details of how similar speech sounds are pronounced, e.g., at the beginnings of words, "p" in English has a puff of air (aspirated) while "p" in French does not. We propose to explore the kinds of details (like aspiration) that are stored during sound sequence learning, and whether attention to these details is motivated by language experience or whether any type of detail is equally likely to be encoded. Cross-age comparison (adults, infants) clarifies the role of experience while cross-language comparison allows us to disentangle the influence of language experience from biases that are less experience dependent. Our research explores novel questions in the acquisition and processing of speech sounds; adding to our basic knowledge of human learning and memory, speech perception, and language acquisition.