Contributions of infant learning to language acquisition

描述（由申请人提供）：孩子们直到大约一岁生日的时候才会说他们的第一个单词，但是使用实验方法的研究表明，婴儿在开始说话之前就已经学会了很多关于他们语言的知识。研究人员现在认为，婴儿在第一年就学会了感知语言的语音类别（辅音和元音），他们学会了识别几十个单词（即使他们不知道它们的意思）。这个项目将帮助我们确定这种学习是如何发生的，以及它如何帮助孩子在第二年的语言学习中取得进一步的进步。研究人员发现，即使只有6个月大的婴儿也已经知道一些单词的意思。使用最近开发的技术，将有可能判断婴儿是否学习抽象单词和更具体的单词，以及哪种学习机制可能负责。该项目还将支持对婴儿定向语音的声学研究，并测试婴儿如何学习元音的计算模型，从一个理论开始，即认识单词有助于婴儿学习语音类别。第二组实验将测试婴幼儿如何学会分辨两个发音不同的单词何时真的是不同的单词（比如“ten”和“tin”），以及何时是相同的单词（比如在不同的语言环境中说的“ten”）。因此，该项目将跟踪发展

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children don't say their first words until around the time of their first birthday, but research using experimental methods has shown that infants learn a great deal about their language before they start saying words. Researchers now believe that infants learn to perceive their language's speech sound categories (consonants and vowels) in the first year, and they learn to recognize dozens of words (even if they don't know what they mean). This project will help us determine how this learning happens, and how it helps children make further progress in language learning over the second year. The project begins by following up on the investigator's discovery that even infants as young as 6 months already know what some words mean; using recently developed techniques, it will be possible to tell whether infants learn abstract words as well as more concrete ones, and what kinds of learning mechanisms may be responsible. The project will also support study of the acoustics of infant-directed speech and testing of computational models of how infants might learn vowels, starting from a theory stating that knowing words helps infants learn speech sound categories. A second set of experiments will test how infants and toddlers learn to tell when two different-sounding words really are different words (like "ten" and "tin") and when they are the same (like "ten" spoken in different linguistic environments). Thus, the project will trace the development of speech sound perception and interpretation from early infancy into the second year, aiming for mechanistic explanations of the child's first steps in language acquisition.