Developmental Origins of Domain-Specificity in Auditory Cognition

甚至在他们出生之前，人类婴儿通常就会接触到各种丰富而复杂的声音结构，包括语音和音乐。许多证据表明，非常小的婴儿从他们早期的声音经验中学习。婴儿对特定类型的语言和特定类型的音乐表现出偏好。这个研究项目将探索语言和音乐学习在多大程度上是由共同的心理机制和发展过程驱动的，相反，在多大程度上，每个人都使用了特定的、独立的系统。虽然音乐和语言包含许多重叠的特征，但它们也具有根本不同的结构，需要特定领域的认知和感知过程。然而，婴儿必须通过接触丰富而复杂的音乐和语言输入来获得对每个领域的感知知识。一个基本的问题是，婴儿在多大程度上是通过音乐和语言特定的处理机制，还是通过领域通用的学习过程和长时间接触有模式的声音来克服这一挑战的。这个项目研究了成年人在试图从不熟悉的声音序列中学习模式时是否依赖于音乐和语言特定的偏见，并研究了这种偏见是否会从婴儿期发展到成年期保持稳定。任务预期会产生截然不同的结果，这取决于参与者是使用领域通用策略还是领域特定策略，因此应该对听觉认知中领域特定过程和表征的发展轨迹和起源产生重要的见解。拟议的研究解决了关于先天、模块化适应和获得的专业知识的相对贡献的基本问题，它们将增加我们对早期发育过程中支持学习的机制本质的理解。尽管我们对婴儿如何习得语言知识有很多了解，但对音乐知识的习得知之甚少，尽管这两种知识都是在可比的发育时间框架内获得的，并且可能相互作用。了解音乐体验如何影响语言和其他非音乐领域可能有助于推进应用和教育领域的知识，在这些领域，音乐训练和与音乐的接触越来越多地显示出在课堂内外具有广泛的心理健康和认知益处，以及使用音乐促进语言康复的疗法。

Even before they are born, human infants are typically exposed to a wide range of rich and complex sound structures, including both speech and music. Much evidence suggests that very young infants learn from their early sound experiences. Infants exhibit preferences for particular types of speech and particular types of music. This program of research will explore the extent to which language and music learning are driven by common mental mechanisms and developmental processes, and, conversely, the extent to which specific, separate systems are used for each.Although music and speech contain many overlapping features, they also possess fundamentally distinct structures that require domain-specific cognitive and perceptual processes. Infants must nevertheless acquire perceptual knowledge about each domain through exposure to a rich and complex mixture of musical and linguistic input. A fundamental question is the extent to which infants overcome this challenge through music- and speech-specific processing mechanisms, or through domain-general learning processes and prolonged exposure to patterned sound. This project examines whether or not adults rely on music- and speech-specific biases when attempting to learn patterns from unfamiliar sound sequences, and it examines whether or not such biases develop or remain stable from infancy to adulthood. Tasks are expected to yield contrasting outcomes depending upon whether participants use domain-general or domain-specific strategies and should therefore yield important insights about the developmental trajectory and origins of domain-specific processes and representations in auditory cognition.The proposed studies tackle fundamental questions about the relative contributions of innate, modular adaptations and acquired expertise, and they will add to our understanding of the nature of mechanisms that support learning during early development. Although a great deal is known about how infants acquire knowledge of language, much less is known about acquisition of musical knowledge even though both types of knowledge are acquired during a comparable developmental time frame and may interact. Understanding how musical experiences influence language and other non-musical domains may help advance knowledge in applied and educational fields, where music training and engagement with music are increasingly shown to have wide-ranging mental health and cognitive benefits within and outside the classroom, and for therapies that use music to facilitate language rehabilitation.