Learning to Listen Ahead in English and Spanish

超出所提供的空间。为了理解语言，孩子们必须学会从随着时间的推移而迅速展开的语音序列中寻找意义。流利的理解需要“提前倾听”，通过使用语言和非语言信息来预测接下来会发生什么。熟练的成年人利用多种知识来源，以如此惊人的速度和效率处理语言，但人们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个月大的英语学习儿童口语理解能力的发展，使用强大的新方法，通过监测儿童在听演讲时的眼球运动来测量单词识别的时间过程。当孩子学会利用连续言语结构的规律性时，理解的效率就会提高，这使孩子能够预测即将出现的单词，并将单词的含义相互联系起来。提出的实验的三个一般假设是：1)婴儿导向语（ID）为没有经验的听者提供了早期语音处理中有用的感知规律；2)儿童使用他们正在学习的语言中出现的语言规律知识来促进单词识别；3)对言语流中可预测元素的快速处理提高了儿童注意和学习新元素的能力。前10个实验探讨了早期的单词学习是否会受到ID语音的共同特征（如夸张的语调和单字话语）的促进，以及儿童如何利用英语中的语言特定线索（如句子重音、形态句法规律、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语音的跨语言实地研究相结合，并将该研究扩展到西班牙语。一项关于西班牙语母亲对婴儿讲话的观察性研究将为在18至30个月的西班牙语学习儿童的讲话处理的7个实验中检验的假设提供依据。这些实验探讨了西班牙语ID语音的特征如何影响婴儿的单词识别，以及西班牙语学习儿童如何利用语言特定线索，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，用于监测年轻语言学习者的在线语言理解，并评估其在评估早期语言发展障碍方面的潜在临床意义。网站性能 ======================================== 节结束 ===========================================

EXCEED THE SPACE PROVIDED. 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. PERFORMANCE SITE ========================================Section End===========================================