Lexical Development in Human Infants

921064 本研究的目的是揭示正常婴儿在出生后6个月内的词汇再认能力。研究的重点是在发声的发病年龄之前，从流利的母亲语音中分割和提取单词（或字长单位）所需的感知和记忆能力。一种新的熟悉偏好（F-Pref）技术已经开发出来，以评估婴儿的敏感性的话。 这种技术涉及一个简短的熟悉期（30-45秒），在此期间，婴儿被呈现嵌入句子中的目标词（或非词），随后测试与不熟悉的词相比，这些词的识别。熟悉后的再认是通过对熟悉的词比不熟悉的词听更长的时间来揭示的。这项技术将被用来进一步探索的条件下，7至8个月大的婴儿能够提取的话，从流利的讲话时，周围的声学，语音，和语言的具体情况是不同的，当说话的速度被改变，当频率的停顿被操纵在熟悉期。除了这些主要问题，我们还将尝试将F-Pref技术扩展到出生后前六个月的婴儿（使用简化的程序），以及年龄较大的婴儿，试图揭示婴儿期语义启动的出现。由于对流利语音中嵌入的单词的分割、提取和记忆是形成词汇的必要前提，这些实验应该揭示婴儿在语言习得早期阶段的基本能力，当时理解被认为上级产生。

921064 The purpose of this research is to reveal the lexical-recognition competencies of normal human infants during the second six months of postnatal development. The focus of the research is on the perceptual and memory abilities required for the segmentation and extraction of words (or wordlength units) from fluent maternal speech prior to the onset-age of vocal production. A new familiarization-preference (F-Pref) technique has been developed to assess infants' sensitivities to words. This technique involves a brief familiarization period (30-45 seconds) during which infants are presented with target words (or non-words) embedded in sentences and subsequently tested for recognition of those words in isolation compared to non-familiar words. Postfamiliarization recognition is revealed by longer listening times to familiar over non-familiar words. This technique will be used to explore further the conditions under which 7 to 8 month old infants are able to extract words from fluent speech when the surrounding acoustic, phonetic, and language-specific contexts are varied, when speaking rate is altered, and when the frequency of pauses is manipulated during the familiarization period. In addition to these primary questions, we will also attempt to extend the F-Pref technique to infants in the first six months of postnatal development (using simplified procedures), and to older infants in an attempt to reveal the emergence of semantic priming in infancy. Because the segmentation, extraction, and memory for words embedded in fluent speech is a necessary precursor to the formation of a lexicon, these experiments should reveal a fundamental capacity of infants in the early stage of language acquisition when comprehension is thought to be superior to production.