Crosslinguistic investigations on the development of rhythmic preferences in German and French infants

最近对早期语言习得的研究提供了证据，表明节奏信息是婴儿用来引导获得目标语言的词汇和句法特性的最早线索之一（例如，Morgan & Demuth，2006），婴儿在出生后的头几个月内获得了目标语言的特定节奏和其他韵律特性（有关综述和最新数据，请参见Höhle，Bijeljac- Babic，赫罗尔德，Weissenborn & Nazzi，in press）。关于一般的听觉偏差如何与目标语言的特定声学特性相互作用的问题，人们知之甚少。从跨语言学的角度，本研究将比较婴儿在学习不同语言时对节奏模式的早期感知偏好。而德国显示了一个重音为基础的节奏与trochaic优势的词汇重音水平，法语有一个音节为基础的节奏没有词汇重音，但短语的最后突出，由于最后延长。我们先前关于压力模式偏好和辨别力的发展工作揭示了单语法语和德语婴儿之间的感知差异（Höhle等人，出版中; Bijeljac-Babic，Serres，Höhle & Nazzi，编写中）。在这项工作之后，为了建立一般声学机制对获得扬抑偏置的预测效果，我们将首先质疑扬抑律/扬抑律独立于母语属性适用的说法（Hay & Diehl，2007），通过使用更像语言的条件（第1部分）重新评估单语德语和法语成人和婴儿的这一定律。其次，我们将扩展我们在压力模式偏好方面的发展和成人工作（Höhle等人，出版），强调歧视（Höhle等人，出版中; Bijeljac-Babic等人，的准备），和抑扬格/扬抑法的双语法-德成人和婴儿的应用，以评估双语（法-德）环境对韵律加工的影响（第2部分）。

Recent research on early language acquisition has provided evidence that rhythmic information is one of the earliest cues infants use to bootstrap into the acquisition of lexical and syntactic properties of the target language (e.g., Morgan & Demuth, 2006) and that infants acquire the specific rhythmic and other prosodic properties of their target language within the first months of life (for a review and recent data, see Höhle, Bijeljac- Babic, Herold, Weissenborn & Nazzi, in press). Less is known about the question of how general auditory biases interact with the specific acoustic properties of the target language. Taking a crosslinguistic perspective, this project will compare early perceptual preferences of rhythmic patterns in infants learning languages that fundamentally differ in their rhythmic organization. Whereas German shows a stressed-based rhythm with a trochaic dominance on the level of lexical stress, French has a syllable-based rhythm with no lexical stress but phrase-final prominence due to final lengthening. Our previous developmental work on stress pattern preference and discrimination has revealed perceptual differences between monolingual French and German infants (Höhle et al., in press; Bijeljac- Babic, Serres, Höhle & Nazzi, in preparation). Following this work, and to establish predicted effects of general acoustic mechanisms for the acquisition of the trochaic bias, we will first question the claim that the iambic/trochaic law applies independently of the properties of the native language (Hay & Diehl, 2007) by reassessing this law in monolingual German and French adults and infants, using more language-like conditions (Part 1). Second, we will expand our developmental and adult work on stress pattern preference (Höhle et al., in press), stress discrimination (Höhle et al., in press; Bijeljac-Babic et al., in preparation), and the application of the iambic/trochaic law to bilingual French-German adults and infants in order to evaluate the influence of a bilingual (French-German) environment on prosodic processing (Part 2).