Decoding continuous speech in infancy

解码婴儿期的连续语音

• 批准号: RGPIN-2018-05686
• 负责人: Johnson, Elizabeth
• 金额: $ 3.06万
• 依托单位: University of Toronto
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2019-01-01 至 2020-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=688572
• 关键词: Decoding; continuous; speech; infancy

Imagine a mom and her 6-month-old watching a bird peck at crumbs on the sidewalk. The mom says Look at the pigeon! That is a pigeon. See the pigeon?' Later, the child is having lunch with her dad in the park. A bird swoops down and lands next to them. Dad jokes Should I give the pigeon a smidgen of my pickle?' In this hypothetical example, what has the child learned? How much does she understand? Does she now know the word pigeon? These questions seem simple, but they are not. As I will explain below, this example illustrates some key theoretical issues my research program is designed to address.******First, speech contains no reliable cues to word boundaries. Adults perceive speech as a string of discrete words only because they know how words typically sound. The lack of physical cues to word boundaries can be appreciated by listening to an unfamiliar language word boundaries blend together, obscuring where one word ends and the next begins. Thus, before we can ask whether the infant in this example understands pigeon', we must first ask whether they have extracted the word from their parents' utterances. Past work suggests that 6-month-olds do not yet do this, but I hypothesize that infants do segment out words when they are repeatedly aligned with an utterance edge (i.e. the Edge Hypothesis). Our hypothetical mom has done what moms often do when addressing their infants pigeon' is repeatedly positioned utterance-finally. ******Assuming the infant has segmented out pigeon', the next question is whether she will understand pigeon' when spoken by dad. 6-month-olds understand some words, so it is conceivable that the infant may understand pigeon when spoken by mom (especially if mom labels pigeons regularly). But whether or not the child will recognize and understand this word when spoken by dad is another question altogether. First, the dad places the word utterance-medially, making it hard to identify. Moreover, according to distributional models, the fact that dad also produces the syllable pih' in pickle' and gin' in smidgen' may lead the child to hypothesize that the syllables pih' and gin' are each a word. And finally, past research has shown that infants struggle with cross-gender word identification (i.e., a word learned in a female voice is recognized in another female voice, but hard to recognize in a male voice). And if mom and dad speak different variants of English (e.g., mom speaks Canadian English, dad speaks British English), this could complicate matters further. And yet, infants readily learn language despite these challenges.******In my research, I ask: ***1) How and when do infants segment words from speech? ***2) How and when do infants learn to cope with speech variability? ***3) What is the impact of being exposed to more than one variant of English? ******Answers to these questions will advance our theoretical understanding of infant development, and lay the groundwork for more applied advances in speech-language pathology.

想象一下，一位母亲和她6个月大的孩子看着一只鸟啄人行道上的面包屑。妈妈说，看鸽子！那是一只鸽子。看到鸽子了吗后来，孩子和爸爸在公园里吃午饭。一只鸟俯冲下来，落在他们旁边。爸爸开玩笑说，我应该给鸽子一点泡菜吗？在这个假设的例子中，孩子学到了什么？她懂多少？她现在知道鸽子这个词了吗这些问题看似简单，其实不然。正如我将在下面解释的那样，这个例子说明了我的研究计划旨在解决的一些关键理论问题。首先，言语不包含可靠的词边界线索。成年人之所以把言语看作是一串离散的单词，只是因为他们知道单词的典型发音。缺乏物理线索的单词边界可以通过听一个不熟悉的语言单词边界混合在一起，模糊了一个单词结束和下一个单词开始的地方来欣赏。因此，在我们问这个例子中的婴儿是否理解pigeon之前，我们必须先问他们是否从父母的话语中提取了这个词。过去的研究表明，6个月大的婴儿还没有做到这一点，但我假设，婴儿分割出的话，当他们反复与话语边缘对齐（即边缘假说）。 我们假设的妈妈已经做了妈妈们在称呼她们的婴儿时经常做的事情，鸽子“是反复定位的话语--最后。** 假设婴儿已经切分出了鸽子，下一个问题是，当爸爸说鸽子时，她是否会理解。6个月大的婴儿可以理解一些单词，所以可以想象，当妈妈说鸽子的时候，婴儿可能会理解鸽子（特别是如果妈妈经常给鸽子贴标签的话）。但是，当爸爸说这个词时，孩子是否会认识和理解这个词是另一个问题。首先，父亲把这个词放在中间，使它很难识别。此外，根据分布模型，父亲也会发出音节pih' in pickle'和gin' in smidgen'的事实可能会导致孩子假设音节pih'和gin'都是一个单词。最后，过去的研究表明，婴儿在识别跨性别单词时会有困难（即，在一个女声中学习的单词在另一个女声中被识别，但在男声中很难识别）。如果妈妈和爸爸说不同的英语变体（例如，妈妈说加拿大英语，爸爸说英国英语），这可能会使问题进一步复杂化。然而，尽管有这些挑战，婴儿还是很容易学习语言。在我的研究中，我问：*1）婴儿如何以及何时从语音中分割单词？*2）婴儿如何以及何时学会科普言语变异？***3）接触一种以上的英语变体会产生什么影响？** 这些问题的答案将促进我们对婴儿发展的理论理解，并为言语语言病理学的更多应用进展奠定基础。