Perception and Processing of Prosodic Information in Infancy

婴儿期韵律信息的感知和处理

• 批准号: 327319-2012
• 负责人: Curtin, Suzanne
• 金额: $ 2.26万
• 依托单位: University of Calgary
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2015-01-01 至 2016-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=571983
• 关键词: Perception; Processing; Prosodic; Information; Infancy

To successfully acquire language, a child must learn about words - what they are and what sound combinations make a possible word - and they must learn how words group together to form sentences. Remarkably, infants acquire a great deal of their language within the first 2 years of life. My research examines how babies begin to make sense of the language around them even before they are able to speak. One way an infant can 'bootstrap' acquisition is by attending to highly salient information in speech. In particular, babies attend to and like listening to the rhythm of language. Rhythm is part of the prosodic property of speech, which also includes word stress (exaggerated syllables, such as the first part of the word 'baby'). Prosodic information highlights linguistic structure such as phrases and sentence boundaries. The overarching goal of my research is to test how the perception and processing of prosodic information - specifically word stress - facilitates the detection of linguistic structure in the speech input and bootstraps word learning. This research program endeavours to explain the dynamic process of acquiring word knowledge and to elucidate the mechanisms that infants use to learn about words. A comprehensive exploration of the processes underlying word learning involves consideration of multiple sources of influence, from basic speech perception, to the use of complex structures to establish word-referent relationships, such as infants' use of sentences to glean word meaning. The proposed experiments reflect these multiple levels of influence on early word learning. With the complexity of the language system (sounds, words, meanings, sentences), determining when and how infants identify and build structure over the first years of life will contribute to the advancement of theories and models of development and language processing in general. My findings will be of interest to cognitive and developmental psychologists, and will be of particular interest to NSE scientists because understanding speech development is necessary for discovering neurological and physiological underpinnings of the behaviour and for the advancement of speech technologies, such as speech recognition systems.

为了成功地习得语言，孩子们必须学习单词--它们是什么，什么声音组合可能构成一个单词--他们还必须学习单词如何组合在一起组成句子。值得注意的是，婴儿在出生后的头两年就学会了大量的语言。我的研究考察了婴儿是如何在会说话之前就开始理解周围语言的。 婴儿获得“自助式”学习的一种方式是注意语言中的重要信息。特别是，婴儿会注意并喜欢听语言的节奏。节奏是语音韵律特性的一部分，它还包括单词重音(夸张的音节，例如单词的第一部分)。韵律信息突出语言结构，如短语和句子边界。我研究的主要目标是测试韵律信息的感知和处理--特别是单词重音--如何促进语音输入中的语言结构检测和引导单词学习。 本研究计划致力于解释获得词汇知识的动态过程，并阐明婴儿学习词汇的机制。对单词学习过程的全面探索涉及到多种影响来源的考虑，从基本的言语感知到使用复杂的结构来建立单词-指称关系，例如婴儿使用句子来收集单词的意义。所提出的实验反映了这些对早期单词学习的多层次影响。由于语言系统(声音、单词、意义、句子)的复杂性，确定婴儿在生命的最初几年何时以及如何识别和构建结构将有助于发展和语言处理的理论和模型的发展。认知和发展心理学家会对我的发现感兴趣，NSE的科学家也会特别感兴趣，因为了解言语发展对于发现行为的神经和生理基础以及语音技术的进步(如语音识别系统)是必要的。