Crosslinguistic developmental comparison of the processing of consonants and vowels in early lexical acquisition

Nespor等人的提议。(2003)儿童和成人的研究都支持辅音在单词编码和识别中比元音更有意义。然而，虽然这种辅音优势(也称为C偏向)在成年期可能在不同语言之间非常稳定，但它在婴儿期跨语言出现的轨迹可能不同于发展文献中所报道的语言之间的差异。事实上，在法语中，从8个月大开始，辅音在词汇层面上的优势已经得到了确凿的证明，但在英语中，这种不对称在30个月大之前就没有被观察到。此外，在20个月大的时候，学习德语的婴儿对发音和辅音信息同样敏感，而学习丹麦语的婴儿对发音有偏见。这种跨语言差异强烈地表明，词汇的C偏向是在语言习得过程中获得的，这对最初关于语言普遍的、可能是先天的偏向促进词汇习得的假设提出了质疑。然而，哪些特定的语言特性会影响C-偏向的表达仍是个问题。该跨语言发展项目旨在通过系统地比较不同年龄和不同词汇任务的德语和法语学习婴儿对辅音和元音的相对敏感度和使用情况，进一步揭示语言输入在C偏向产生和时间进程中的潜在作用。德语和法语在几个可能影响辅音和元音加工的变量上存在差异：辅音-元音比(德语：25-15对法语：17-15)，节奏结构(德语：重音计时语言，法语：基于音节的语言)，词汇重音的存在(德语中存在，但在法语中不存在)，紧张性的语音特征(德语区分紧元音和松散元音；法语不区分元音)等等。学习法语和德语的婴儿从出生到20个月的数据将在巴黎和波茨坦收集。所有任务都利用辅音和发音信息在不同加工水平的词汇相关加工中的相对使用情况：任务1-2将专注于对无意义的词形的加工，任务3-5将专注于对已知单词的加工。这些研究将依赖于一系列的行为(HPP，眼球跟踪)、电生理(ERPs)和神经成像(NIRS)技术。我们的发现将为词汇加工中的C偏向的起源和发展轨迹提供重要的信息。它将通过探索辅音和元音在出生时的不同作用，以及通过确定C偏向出现的跨语言不变性和语言特异性方面，对先天感知能力和语言输入之间的相互作用带来新的见解。

The proposal by Nespor et al. (2003) that consonants are more involved than vowels in word encoding and recognition has been supported by both toddler and adult studies. However, while this consonantal advantage (also called C-bias) is possibly very stable in adulthood across languages, its emergence might not follow the same trajectory cross-linguistically in infancy as differences between languages have been reported in the developmental literature. Indeed, while in French a consonant advantage at the lexical level has been firmly demonstrated from 8 months of age onwards, this asymmetry has not been observed before 30 months of age in English. Moreover, at 20 months, German-learning infants were shown to be as sensitive to vocalic as to consonantal information, and Danish-learning infants have a vocalic bias. This cross-linguistic variation strongly suggests that the lexical C-bias is acquired during language acquisition, which questions the original assumption of a language-general, possibly innate bias that facilitates lexical acquisition. However, it is still under question which language-specific properties affect the expression of the C-bias. The proposed cross-linguistic developmental project aims to shed more light on the potential role of language input in the emergence and the time course of the C-bias by systematically comparing the relative sensitivity to and use of consonants and vowels by German- and French-learning infants at different ages and across different lexical tasks. German and French differ on several variables likely to affect the processing of consonants and vowels: their consonant-vowel ratio (German: 25-15 vs. French 17-15), their rhythmic structure (German: stress-timed language, French: syllable-based language), the existence of lexical stress (present in German, but not in French), the phonetic feature of tenseness (German distinguishes tense and lax vowels; French does not), etc. Data from French- and German-learning infants from birth to 20 months will be collected in Paris and Potsdam. All tasks tap into the comparative use of consonantal and vocalic information in lexically-related processing at different processing levels: TASKs 1-2 will focus on the processing of word forms without meaning and TASKs 3-5 will focus on the processing of known words. The studies will rely on an array of behavioral (HPP, eye-tracking), electrophysiological (ERPs), and neuroimaging (NIRS) techniques. Our findings will bring crucial information regarding the origin and developmental trajectory of the C-bias in lexical processing. It will bring new insights about the interaction between innate perceptual capacities and linguistic input by exploring the differential roles of consonants and vowels at birth and by determining the cross-linguistically invariant versus language-specific aspects of the emergence of the C-bias.