Speaker variability augments phonological processing in early word learning
Speaker variability augments phonological processing in early word learning
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DOI：
10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00786.x
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发表时间：
2009-03-01
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
McMurray, Bob
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Rost, Gwyneth C.;McMurray, Bob
在单词学习的早期阶段，婴儿在学习词汇邻居(即不同音素的单词对)方面存在困难，尽管他们在纯听觉任务中能够区分相同的对比。虽然之前的研究集中于自上而下对这种失败的解释(例如任务要求、词汇竞争)，但没有人研究自下而上的声学-语音因素是否起到了作用。我们假设，通过在被学习的单词中加入更大的声学可变性，可以改善词汇邻居学习，因为这可能支持仍在发展中的语音类别，并帮助婴儿识别相关的对比维度。婴儿被暴露在带有标签的图片中，这些标签由一个或多个说话者说出。在测试中，处于单一说话者状态的婴儿无法识别这两个词之间的区别，而听到多个说话者的婴儿则对它们进行了区分。
Infants in the early stages of word learning have difficulty learning lexical neighbors (i.e. word pairs that differ by a single phoneme), despite their ability to discriminate the same contrast in a purely auditory task. While prior work has focused on top-down explanations for this failure (e.g. task demands, lexical competition), none has examined if bottom-up acoustic-phonetic factors play a role. We hypothesized that lexical neighbor learning could be improved by incorporating greater acoustic variability in the words being learned, as this may buttress still-developing phonetic categories, and help infants identify the relevant contrastive dimension. Infants were exposed to pictures accompanied by labels spoken by either a single or multiple speakers. At test, infants in the single-speaker condition failed to recognize the difference between the two words, while infants who heard multiple speakers discriminated between them.