Using eye-tracking and in-depth video analysis to understand how speech input relates to speech development

50年前，婴儿语言感知领域诞生了。在一项彻底改变我们理解早期认知发展方式的研究中，婴儿被证明像成年人一样以一种分类的方式感知语音。随后的研究表明，这种行为是普遍的，与语言经验无关。从这些最初的基础研究开始，旨在测量儿童对语音反应的注意力转移的实验范式揭示了口语的发展取决于先天知识和经验之间复杂的相互作用。但直到最近，研究结果主要是基于实验者手工编码的数据，这种方法容易受到实验者偏见的影响，而且无法捕捉到微妙的、细粒度的行为，而这些行为往往是回答微妙的实验问题所必需的。而且，大多数分析都是对数十名婴儿进行的不完整的观察，它们关注的是群体层面的影响，因此无法解决个体经历如何与语言发展中的个体差异联系在一起的问题。值得庆幸的是，最近的技术进步提供了更复杂的方法来测试婴儿发育问题。随着语音信号的展开，眼球追踪器可以自动记录儿童的目光/瞳孔扩张，专门的软件可以根据儿童的表现实时定制实验。使用先进的动画技术可以创建高度吸引人的实验刺激，提高实验室收集数据的质量。视听技术和数字记忆的进步使得收集个人看护人与儿童互动的数据丰富的纵向记录成为可能，然后这些记录可以与感知研究中的个人表现相一致。Johnson一直是使用这些技术来研究语言发展的开拓者（例如，她开发了第一个与眼球追踪数据相关的护理人员与婴儿互动的大规模视频语料库，并与SR Research合作，帮助他们测试婴儿眼球追踪系统的第一个手臂支架）。但约翰逊在多伦多大学建立实验室时购买的设备现在已经过时了。为了保持她在语言多样性社区的语言发展方面的前沿研究项目，她将购买一个新的Eyelink眼动仪，并更新她实验室的刺激产生和视听记录设备。她还将更换过时的软件，并购买一种新型的头戴式眼动仪。这个新的婴儿语音测试装置将与其他认知科学家广泛共享，其中最著名的是助理教授Jessamyn Schertz，他是语音感知和生成之间关系的专家。更新这些设备将有助于加拿大的培训和研究能力，并促进我们对越来越多的多语言人口的语言发展的理解。

Fifty years ago, the field of infant speech perception was born. In a study that revolutionized the way we understand early cognitive development, infants were shown to perceive speech sounds in a categorical manner much like adults do. Subsequent work demonstrated that this behaviour was universal, and independent of language experience. Since these initial foundational studies, experimental paradigms designed to measure children's attentional shifts in response to speech sounds have revealed that the development of spoken language depends on an intricate interplay between innate knowledge and experience. But until recently, findings have been primarily based on data that has been hand-coded by experimenters, an approach susceptible to experimenter bias, and unable to capture the subtle, fine-grained behaviour that often is necessary to answer nuanced experimental questions. And most analyses have collapsed observations across dozens of infants, focusing on group-level effects and therefore unable to address the question of how individual experiences are linked to individual differences in speech development. Thankfully, recent technological advancements offer more sophisticated methods to test questions about infant development. Eye-trackers can automatically record children's gaze/pupil dilation as the speech signal unfolds, and specialized software can tailor experiments in real time in response to children's performance. Highly engaging experimental stimuli can be created using advanced animation technology, improving the quality of data collected in the lab. And improvements in audio-visual technology and digital memory make it feasible to collect data-rich longitudinal recordings of individual caregiver-child interactions, which can then be aligned with individual performance in perception studies. Johnson has been a trailblazer in the use of these technologies to study speech development (e.g., she developed the first large-scale video corpus of caregiver-infant interactions linked to eyetracking data, and worked with SR Research to help them beta-test their first arm mount for their infant eyetracking system). But the equipment Johnson purchased when she was first built her lab at U of Toronto is now becoming obsolete. To maintain her cutting-edge research program on speech development in linguistically-diverse communities, she will purchase a new Eyelink eyetracker and update the stimulus creation and audio-visual recording equipment in her lab. She will also replace outdated software and purchase a new type of headmounted eyetracker. This new infant speech testing setup will be widely shared with other cognitive scientists, most notably Assistant Professor Jessamyn Schertz an expert in the relationship between speech perception and production. Updating this equipment will contribute to Canada's training and research capacities, as well as advance our understanding of speech development in our increasingly multilingual population.