Learning to Listen Ahead in English and Spanish

为了理解语言，孩子们必须学会倾听展开的语音序列中的意义。 在时间上迅速。流畅的理解需要“提前倾听”，不断地预测接下来会发生什么 通过使用语言和非语言信息从上下文中的话是口语。熟练成年人 利用多种知识源来以如此显著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。研究的第一个目标是 调查18-30岁英语学习儿童口语理解能力的发展 几个月，使用强大的新方法来测量单词识别的时间过程， 孩子们听演讲时的眼球运动。理解的效率随着孩子的学习而提高 利用连续语音结构中的重复性，使儿童能够预测 “言”与“意”，是互相联系的。三个基本假设 拟议的实验是：1）婴儿指导（ID）语音为没有经验的听众提供了 知觉的认知在早期的言语处理中是有用的; 2）孩子们使用他们的新兴知识， 3）在他们正在学习的语言中，语言学知识有助于单词识别; 3）快速 对语音流中可预测元素的处理提高了儿童的注意力和学习能力 关于新的元素。前10个实验询问早期单词学习是否被普通的 的特点，如夸张的语调和一个字的话语，以及儿童如何利用 英语中的特定语言线索，如句子重音，形态句法结构，词序， 语义信息在理解流利语音中的作用。该项目的第二个目标是整合实验室 婴儿言语理解的研究与ID言语的跨语言领域研究，扩展了这一点， 研究西班牙语。一项关于西班牙裔母亲对婴儿说话的观察性研究将为我们提供信息。 在7个关于18 - 30岁西班牙语学习儿童语音处理的实验中检验假设 个月这些实验探讨了婴儿的词汇识别是如何受到 西班牙语ID语音，以及学习西班牙语的儿童如何利用语言特定的线索，如性别- 数字标记、词序和语义信息在理解流利语音中的作用。第三个目标是 完善新开发的实验程序，用于监测年轻人的在线语音理解 语言学习者，并评估其潜在的临床相关性，以评估早期语言障碍 发展

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.