The Development of Native Language Speech Perception

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究旨在描述暴露于母语导致婴儿言语感知变化的过程。母语声音系统的特性会影响听者对语音的感知，这种现象始于婴儿期。这些研究将为进一步研究婴儿语言加工系统发育过程中语音信息和语音定向信息的相互作用奠定基础。 实验1和实验2考察了母语语音类别熟悉度的发展。实验一问什么年龄的婴儿识别一组语音类别，出现在他们的语言中的语音类别，并与语音类别，不出现在语言中。实验2问更细粒度的问题，这种发展的敏感性是否也存在于语言内的类别，也就是说，婴儿敏感的语音类别之间的差异，经常出现在他们的语言与类别，出现频率低，在他们的语言？实验3和实验4考察了婴儿语音定向系统的发育对语音对比辨别的影响。两个实验都比较了来自不同语言背景的婴儿（实验3，英语与日语;实验4，英语与西班牙语）对两种语言中仅一种语言的语音对比的辨别。 本研究的目的是为研究语音和音序发展的相互作用奠定基础。以前的研究表明，这两个方面的知觉/语言发展可能会出现在一个单一的计算的基础上-特定于上下文的语音学习算法。 然而，在开始这项研究计划之前，有必要充实我们对发展基本时间进程的了解。这些数据将反过来告诉我们，婴儿的感知与母语相协调的机制是什么，这为婴儿开始学习单词和语法提供了基础。这个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。对学习者如何完成这一壮举的更全面的理解可能最终导致语言障碍个体治疗的进步，导致更成功的第二语言教学方法，以及更好的语音识别系统的发展。

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.