DEVELOPMENT OF SPEECH PERCEPTION CAPACITIES

提出了一系列实验来研究基本的 婴幼儿言语知觉能力及其在儿童言语行为中的作用 掌握一种母语。在发展过程中， 语音处理能力变得适合特定的组织 母语发音模式，提供快速、高效的识别 用流利的语言表达。因此，拟议研究的一个目的是 开发更清晰的婴儿编码和语音信息的图片 记住。需要对婴儿的语言记忆能力进行更全面的说明 为了了解单词学习的基本过程和发展 词典。一些拟议研究审查了以下问题的性质和范围 婴儿保留的关于语言的信息以及这对 词库的增长和组织。调查员一直在探索 婴儿利用他们日益增长的母语发音知识模式 从流畅的语音中切分单词。因此，第二个目标是确定潜在的 婴儿在处理流利语音时使用的单词边界提示 调查婴儿如何以及何时整合各种可用的线索 敬他们。更清楚地了解婴儿检测和识别的单词的性质 从流利的语音进行编码将有助于理解它们是如何开始 发现母语话语的句法组织。例如, 对某些语法语素位置出现的敏感性 可以为学习者提供句法方面的线索 组织。该实验室之前的研究表明，婴儿 对话语的韵律标记很敏感。因此，第三个主要目标是 拟议的研究如何将这种对韵律的敏感性与其他 语音信号中的信息，如语法的出现 帮助学习者发现句法组织的语素 他们的母语。

A series of experiments is proposed to investigate the basic speech perception capacities of infants and the role of these capacities in acquiring a native language. During the course of development, speech-processing capacities become adapted to the specific organization of native language sound patterns to provide fast and efficient recognition of words in fluent speech. Accordingly, one aim of the proposed research is to develop a clearer picture of the speech information that infants encode and remember. A fuller account of infants' memory capacities for speech is required to understand processes underlying word learning and the development of a lexicon. A number of the proposed studies examine the nature and extent of information that infants retain about speech and the implications this has for the growth and organization of a lexicon. The investigator has been exploring infants' use of their growing knowledge of native language sounds patterns to segment words from fluent speech. Thus, a second aim is to identify potential cues to word boundaries used by infants in processing fluent speech and to investigate how and when infants integrate the various cues that are available to them. A clearer picture of the nature of the words that infants detect and encode from fluent speech will be useful in understanding how they begin to discover the syntactic organization of native language utterances. For example, sensitivity to the occurrence of positioning of certain grammatical morphemes in utterances could provide the learner with clues about syntactic organization. Previous research from this laboratory has shown that infants are sensitive to the prosodic marking of utterances. Thus, a third major aim of the proposed research how this sensitivity to prosody might be used with other information in the speech signal, such as the occurrence of grammatical morphemes to aid learners in the discovery of the syntactic organization of their native language.