DHB: Collaborative Research: Cognition and Social Development in Linguistic Change: A Pilot Study

当一个孩子学会一门语言时，他们必须理解他们周围听到的语言。但这种语言并不总是相同的-它因说话者和情况而异。孩子听到的不同的人说话的方式不同，他/她的母亲在玩耍或管教他/她时也会使用不同的语言。匹兹堡大学的苏珊娜·科廷和斯科特·基斯林教授以及卡内基梅隆大学的洛里·霍尔特教授都是语言学家和心理学家，他们正在探索孩子是如何在头脑中组织语音的，以及为什么他们最终会这样说话。照顾者在这个过程中有多大的影响力？研究人员从之前的研究中了解到，孩子们不会完全模仿父母的口音，但父母的口音通常会影响他们的说话方式。人们还注意到，父母有外国口音的孩子有时没有意识到他们的父母说话与母语者不同。孩子的口音的哪些方面受到照顾者的影响，哪些是由其他力量（特别是同龄人）决定的，以及在什么年龄？了解儿童个体如何发展自己独特的言语模式，将有助于更好地理解儿童所听到的语言在塑造他们如何习得语言方面的作用。这一领域的大多数研究都比较了父母来自不同语言背景的成年人和儿童的言语。这项研究探讨了儿童如何感知他们周围听到的语言，他们如何在脑海中表达它，以及随着他们的成熟，这些知识如何变化。元音在方言中的发音与其他语音不同的可能性更大，即使是在同一个说话者中。例如，来自芝加哥的人说“hat”中的元音的方式对来自田纳西州的人来说是明显的，但这两个城市之间的辅音没有差异。由于元音在发音中变化更大，也更容易用语音设备测量，我们专注于儿童如何感知元音差异。首先，6到24个月大的孩子将接受测试，看他们是否能听到hay和hoe两个单词中元音的不同发音。在第二个实验中，孩子们被测试看他们是否更喜欢一种发‘hoe’元音的方式。将测试记录儿童与同龄儿童自然互动的方法，以及记录与照顾者互动的方法。这些方法将有助于确定儿童如何整理他们从周围的言语中接收到的所有可变信息，并提出自己的说话方式，并将用于未来的研究，该研究将跟踪儿童从婴儿期到学龄期。

When a child acquires a language, they must make sense of the language they hear around them. But this language is not always the same - it varies from speaker to speaker and situation to situation. Different people the child hears speak differently, and his/her mother will also use different kinds of language when playing or disciplining him/her. Professors Suzanne Curtin and Scott Kiesling of the University of Pittsburgh and Lori Holt of Carnegie Mellon University are linguists and psychologists who are exploring how children manage to organize speech sounds in their minds, and why they end up speaking the way they do. How much influence do caregivers have in this process? Researchers know from previous studies that children do not reproduce their parents' accent exactly, but that their parents' accent usually does make a difference in how they talk. It has also been observed that children of parents who have foreign accents are sometimes not aware that their parents speak differently from native speakers. What aspects of the child's accent are influenced by the caregiver, and what are determined by other forces (especially peers), and at what age? Understanding how individual children develop their own unique speech pattern will provide a greater understanding of the role of the language that children hear in shaping how they acquire language. Most research in this area has compared the speech produced by adults and children who have parents from different language backgrounds. This study explores how children perceive the language they hear around them, how they represent it in their minds, and how that knowledge changes as they mature.Vowels are more likely to be pronounced differently in dialects than other speech sounds, even in the same speaker. For example, the way someone from Chicago says the vowel in "hat" is noticeable to someone from Tennessee, but there are no differences in the consonants between these two cities. Since vowels are more variable in pronunciation, and are also more easily measured with phonetic equipment, we focus on how children perceive vowel differences. First, children 6 to 24 months will be tested to see whether they can hear different ways of pronouncing the vowel in the word 'hay,' and in the word 'hoe.' In a second experiment, children are tested to see if they prefer one way of pronouncing the 'hoe' vowel over another instance. Methods to record children in naturalistic interaction with same-age children will be tested, as will methods to record interactions with a caregiver. These methods will help determine how children sort out all the variable information they receive in the speech around them and come up with their own way of speaking, and will be used in a future study that will follow children from infancy to school-age.