The Development of Native Language Speech Perception

描述(由申请人提供)：这项研究旨在描述接触母语导致婴儿言语感知变化的过程。母语发音系统的特性会影响听者对语音的感知，这一现象始于婴儿时期。所提出的研究将构成一个研究项目的基础，该项目将调查语音和音向性信息在婴儿发育的语言处理系统中的交互作用。实验1和实验2考察了对母语语音范畴的熟悉程度的发展。实验一询问婴儿在多大年龄时认出一组出现在他们语言中的语音类别，并与没有出现在该语言中的语音类别进行比较。实验2提出了一个更细粒度的问题，即这种发展中的敏感性是否也存在于语言内类别；即，婴儿对他们语言中频繁出现的语音类别和出现频率较低的类别之间的差异是否敏感？实验3和实验4考察了婴幼儿语音定向系统的发展对语音对比辨别的影响。这两个实验都比较了来自不同语言背景(实验3，英语和日语；实验4，英语和西班牙语)的婴儿对只在两种语言中的一种语言中的一种语音识别的对比。这项拟议的研究旨在为一项研究项目奠定基础，该项目旨在研究语音和音向发展的相互作用。先前的研究表明，知觉/语言发展的这两个方面可能都是基于一种单一的计算--特定于语境的语音学习算法。然而，在开始这个研究计划之前，有必要充实我们对发展的基本时间进程的知识。这些数据反过来将使我们了解婴儿的感知与母语协调的机制，这为婴儿开始学习单词和语法提供了基础。这一过程证明了人脑在高度可变和嘈杂的输入中找到结构的能力。更充分地了解学习者是如何完成这一壮举的，最终可能会导致语言障碍患者治疗方面的进步，更成功的第二语言教学方法，以及更好的语音识别系统的开发。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This research aims to characterize the process by which exposure to the native language results in changes in infants' perception of speech. Properties of the native language sound system affect listeners' perception of speech, a phenomenon that begins during infancy. The proposed studies will form the basis of a research program investigating the interaction of phonetic and phonotactic information in infants' developing language processing system. Experiments 1 and 2 examine the development of familiarity with native language phonetic categories. Experiment 1 asks at what age infants recognize a set of phonetic categories that occur in their language in comparison with phonetic categories that do not occur in the language. Experiment 2 asks the more fine-grained question of whether this developing sensitivity is also present for within-language categories; namely, are infants sensitive to the difference between phonetic categories that occur frequently in their language versus categories that occur with low frequency in their language? Experiments 3 and 4 examine the time course with which infants' developing phonotactic system affects their discrimination of phonetic contrasts. Both experiments compare infants from different language backgrounds (Exp 3, English vs. Japanese; Exp 4, English vs. Spanish) on their discrimination of contrasts that are phonotactically licensed in only one of the two languages. The proposed research is designed to lay the groundwork for a research program examining the interaction of phonetic and phonotactic development. Previous research suggests that both of these aspects of perceptual/linguistic development might arise on the basis of a single computation - a context-specific phonetic learning algorithm. However, before embarking on this research program it is necessary to flesh out our knowledge of the basic time course of development. This data will in turn inform our understanding of the mechanism by which infants' perception becomes attuned to the native language, which provides a foundation from which infants can begin to learn words and grammar. This process exemplifies the ability of the human brain to find structure in the gace of highly variable and noisy input. A fuller understanding of how learners accomplish such a feat may ulitmately lead to advances in the treatment of individuals with disordered language, to more successful methods for second-language instruction, and to the development of better speech recognition systems.