Dissertation Research: Using Acoustic Data to Infer Linguistic Representations in Three Populations

研究正常成人语言特性的一种方法是关注其他人群的这些特性，在这些人群中，语言刚刚发展或已经崩溃。这种研究语言的方法依赖于在不同的语言使用者之间找到一个共同的模式，这可以让我们深入了解语言是如何作为一个整体工作的。本论文研究项目将使用三个人群（语言发育正常的幼儿、有特殊语言障碍的稍大儿童和患有非流利性失语症的成年人）来研究韵律（如单词和句子的节奏结构）在他们的语言中所起的作用，以及语言的心理表征如何影响语言的产生。具体来说，这项研究将研究这些人群讲话中常见的一个特殊现象：在多音节单词中省略开头的非重读音节。声学数据将用于研究当儿童或语言障碍人群省略这些音节时，他们对单词韵律的心理表征是否保持完整，以及韵律结构如何在他们的作品中保存下来。

One way to study the properties of normal adult language is to focus on these properties in other populations in whom language is just developing or in whom it has broken down. This approach to the study of language depends on finding a common pattern across different language users that can give us insight into how language works as a whole. This dissertation research project will use three populations (young children with normally developing language, slightly older children with specific language impairment, and adults with nonfluent aphasia) to address what role prosody (e.g., the rhythm structure of words and sentences) plays in their speech and how mental representations of language affect the production of speech. Specifically, the research will examine a particular phenomenon common to the speech of these populations: the omission of initial unstressed syllables within multisyllabic words. Acoustic data will be used to investigate the question of whether, when children or language disordered populations omit these syllables, their mental representation of the prosody of the words remains intact, and how prosodic structure is preserved in their productions.