Learning to Listen Ahead in English and Spanish

描述（由申请人提供）：为了理解语言，儿童必须学会倾听随着时间的推移迅速展开的语音序列中的含义。流利的理解需要“提前倾听”;通过使用来自所说单词的上下文的语言和非语言信息，不断预测接下来会发生什么。熟练的成年人利用多种知识来源，以便以如此惊人的速度和效率处理语音，但对这种关键能力的早期发展知之甚少。这项研究的第一个目标是调查18-30个月的英语学习儿童的口语理解能力的发展，使用强大的新方法，通过监测儿童听演讲时的眼球运动来测量单词识别的时间过程。理解的效率随着孩子学习利用连续语音结构的优势而提高，使孩子能够预测即将到来的单词并将单词的含义相互联系起来。激发拟议实验的三个一般假设是：1）婴儿指导（ID）语音为没有经验的听众提供了在早期语音处理中有用的感知规则; 2）儿童利用他们正在学习的语言中新兴的语言规则知识来促进单词识别; 3）对语音流中可预测元素的快速处理提高了儿童关注和学习新元素的能力。前10个实验询问早期单词学习是否被ID语音的共同特征（如夸张的语调和一个词的话语）所增强，以及儿童如何利用英语中的语言特定线索（如句子重音、形态句法分析、词序和语义信息）来理解流利的语音。该项目的第二个目标是将婴儿语音理解的实验室研究与ID语音的跨语言领域研究相结合，将这项研究扩展到西班牙语。西班牙裔母亲对婴儿的言语的观察性研究将为在18至30个月的西班牙语学习儿童的言语处理的7个实验中测试的假设提供信息。这些实验探讨了婴儿单词识别是如何受到西班牙语ID语音的特征的影响，以及西班牙语学习儿童如何利用语言特定的线索，如性别和数字标记，词序和语义信息来理解流利的语音。第三个目标是完善新开发的实验程序，监测在线语音理解的年轻语言学习者，并评估其潜在的临床相关性评估疾病的早期语言发展。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): To understand language, children must learn to listen for meaning in sequences of speech sounds that unfold rapidly in time. Fluent understanding requires "listening ahead"; continually anticipating what is coming next by using linguistic and nonlinguistic information from the context in which words are spoken. Skilled adults draw on multiple sources of knowledge in order to process speech with such remarkable speed and efficiency, but little is known about the early development of this critical capacity. The first goal of the research is to investigate the development of spoken language understanding by English-learning children from 18-30 months, using powerful new methods for measuring the time course of word recognition by monitoring children's eye movements as they listen to speech. Efficiency in comprehension increases as the child learns to take advantage of regularities in the structure of continuous speech, enabling the child to anticipate upcoming words and relate word meanings to one another. The three general hypotheses motivating the proposed experiments are: 1) that infant-directed (ID) speech provides the inexperienced listener with perceptual regularities useful in early speech processing; 2) that children use their emerging knowledge of linguistic regularities in the language they are learning to facilitate word recognition; 3) that the rapid processing of predictable elements in the speech stream increases children's capacity to attend to and learn about novel elements. The first l0 experiments ask whether early word learning is enhanced by common features of ID speech such as exaggerated intonation and one-word utterances, and how children make use of language-specific cues in English such as sentence stress, morphosyntactic regularities, word order, and semantic information in understanding fluent speech. The second goal of the project is to integrate laboratory studies of infant speech comprehension with cross-language field research on ID speech, extending this research to Spanish. An observational study of Hispanic mothers' speech to infants will inform the hypotheses to be tested in 7 experiments on speech processing by Spanish-learning children from 18 to 30 months. These experiments explore how infant word recognition is influenced by characteristic features of Spanish ID speech, and how Spanish-learning children make use of language-specific cues such as gender and number-marking, word order, and semantic information in understanding fluent speech. The third goal is to refine newly developed experimental procedures for monitoring on-line speech comprehension by young language learners, and to evaluate their potential clinical relevance for assessing disorders in early language development.