Infant learning of acoustic cues to word boundaries

描述(由申请者提供)：婴儿能够利用许多线索，包括单词重音等声学信息，在流利的语音中定位单词边界。这项申请中提出的研究旨在揭示婴儿对声学线索的注意发展过程，以及允许婴儿发现他们听到的语音中的声学事件对单词边界意味着什么的学习机制。我们假设婴儿使用统计学习-通过跟踪输入中的协方差模式来发现规则的过程-最初识别流利语音中的单词边界，然后检测他们早期词汇中单词开头和偏置的声学规则。如果是这样的话，婴儿应该能够检测到与新语言中的单词边界相对应的声学规则，只要他们能够从这种语言中提取单词。此外，他们应该能够不仅从完美的联想中，而且从仅在大部分时间出现的协方差中了解哪些声学事件指示单词边界，这是自然语言中通常存在的协方差类型。本研究将为婴幼儿习得与词边界有关的多种声学规律提供一个模型。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Infants are capable of exploiting many cues, including acoustic information such as word stress, to locate word boundaries in fluent speech. The research proposed in this application is designed to uncover the developmental course of attention to acoustic cues, and the learning mechanisms that allow infants to discover what the acoustic events in the speech they hear signify about word boundaries. We hypothesize that infants use statistical learning - the process of discovering regularities by tracking patterns of covariance in the input - to initially identify word boundaries in fluent speech, then detect the acoustic regularities of the word onsets and offsets in their early vocabulary. If so, infants should be able to detect the acoustic regularities that correspond to word boundaries in novel languages, so long as they are able to extract words from such a language. Further, they should be able to learn which acoustic events indicate word boundaries not just from perfect associations, but from covariances that occur only a majority of the time, which is the type of covariance usually present in natural languages. This research will provide a model for infant acquisition of multiple acoustic regularities associated with word boundaries.