Development of prosodic competence in early first language acquisition: Behavioral and neurophysiological investigations

该项目旨在研究第一语言习得中的早期韵律发展，重点关注韵律边界的语音和声学相关性。根据以前的研究结果，这些线索的具体星座和他们的权重由听话人是受跨语言的变化，我们将调查时，德国学习的孩子表现出敏感的韵律边界标记典型的德国。为了更好地理解德语中的韵律边界是如何标记的，我们首先对德语使用者产生的具有不同韵律边界位置的话语进行韵律分析，并测试德国成年人对相关线索的处理。这些结果将指导建设的感性实验计划与德国婴儿4个月和8个月大的纵向设计的实验材料。在这些实验中，婴儿对具有自然韵律边界的语音材料和对其中单个声学线索被操纵的语音材料的反应将被测试。对于这些知觉实验，将使用行为方法以及神经生理学测量（EEG）。我们的研究将为理解儿童所具备的基本感知机制与其对目标语言特定特征的协调之间的相互作用提供新的视角，并将提高我们对韵律能力的神经机制发展的理解。

The project aims at the very early prosodic development in first language acquisition with a focus of phonological and acoustic correlates of prosodic boundaries. Based on previous findings that the specific constellation of these cues and their weighting by the hearer Is subject to crosslinguistic variation we will Investigate when the German learning child shows a sensitivity to the prosodic boundary markings typical for German. To get a better understanding how prosodic boundaries are marked in German we will first do a prosodic analysis of utterances with different positions of prosodic boundaries produced by German speakers and test German adults on their processing of the relevant cues. These results will guide the construction of the experimental material for perceptual experiments planned with German Infants between 4-months and 8-months of age in a longitudinal design. In these experiments Infants reactions to speech material with natural prosodic boundaries and to speech material in which single acoustic cues had been manipulated will be tested. For these perceptual experiments behavioural methods as well as neurophysiological measures (EEG) will be used. Our studies will provide new insights into the Interaction of basic perceptual mechanism the child Is equipped with and their attunement to the specific features of the target language and will improve our understanding of the development of the neural mechanisms underiying prosodic competencies.