Infants' use of prosodic cues in language processing

描述(由申请人提供)： 要求提供两年的支助，以调查婴儿听者使用的语音的声学特性，以发现其语言的句法成分。 婴儿在语言习得中使用语音线索进行某些任务，例如分词，在文献中已被广泛讨论。然而，线索在习得其他语法单位，如从句或短语方面的使用，还没有得到广泛的探讨。尽管如此，有一些证据表明，在分割这些较大的单位时，婴儿对韵律线索的强度很敏感。例如，已有研究表明，当语音是婴儿定向的时，婴儿更容易分割语音，因此，婴儿的语音容易受到更大的音调偏移和更大的边界前延长的影响。 该项目有两个目标：(1)揭示婴儿在连续说话中最敏感的韵律线索。(2)找出这些线索中的哪一个在婴儿将语音流解析成大的语法单位(如从句)时权重最大。使用线索来分割较大的单位(从句和短语)尤其重要，因为这些单位比较小的单位(如单词)在更小的年龄被分割。小句的韵律特征比更小的单位更大，更具语言通用性，因此，它们可能为分割更小的、更特定的语言单位(如单词和短语)奠定基础。揭示早期分段中线索权重的信息将告诉我们更多关于婴儿如何从连续语音中分割这些较大的单位，然后是较小的单位。此外，这些单位的切分是语言习得中的一个关键步骤，因为许多关于母语句法结构的信息(例如，词序)可能是从子句和短语中收集的。 在一系列实验中，我们将探索婴儿在分句时使用韵律线索的情况。实验从小句和非小句单位逐一呈现韵律线索，并检验婴儿在分割任务中的表现是保持不变还是因失去每条线索或一组韵律线索而恶化。这样，关于这些线索的知觉权重的信息就被阐明了。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Two years of support are requested for an investigation of the acoustic properties of speech used by an infant listener to discover the syntactic constituents of his/her language. Infants' use of speech cues for some tasks in language acquisition, for example word segmentation, has been extensively discussed in the literature. However, the use of cues in the acquisition of other units of the grammar such as the clause or phrase, has not been as extensively explored. Nonetheless, there is some evidence indicating that infants are sensitive to the strength of prosodic cues in segmentation of these larger units. For example, it has been shown that infants segment speech more easily when speech is infant-directed and hence is speech that is subject to larger pitch excursions and greater preboundary lengthening. This project has two objectives: (1) to uncover the prosodic cues infants are most sensitive to in continuous speech. (2) To find out which of these cues is most heavily weighted in infants' parsing of the speech stream into large grammatical units such as the clause. The use of cues to segment larger units (clauses and phrases) is particularly important since these units are segmented at a younger age than smaller units, such as the word. The prosodic properties of clauses are larger and more language general than smaller units, thus, they may lay the groundwork for the segmentation of smaller and more language specific units (e.g., words and phrases). Uncovering information about the weighting of cues in this early segmentation will tell us more about how infants go about segmenting these larger units and subsequently smaller units from continuous speech. In addition, segmentation of these units is a key step in language acquisition because so much information about the syntactic structure of the native language (for example, word order) may be gleaned from clauses and phrases. In a series of experiments infants' use of prosodic cues in their segmentation of clauses will be explored. The experiments feature prosodic cues one by one from both clausal and non-clausal units and examine whether infants' performance on segmentation tasks remains the same or worsens as the result of the loss of each cue or group of prosodic cues. In this way, information concerning the perceptual weighting of these cues is elucidated.