Learning of sound sequences by infants and adults

为了理解语言是如何学习和使用的，我们必须了解语言表征是如何形成的，这些表征中包含的信息，以及我们如何适当地从中提取信息。我的研究计划侧重于我们如何成为有能力的语言使用者;在这个更广泛的目标，目前的建议探讨语音表征的形成和内容。 我们一直在研究的语音的特殊方面是关于它们是如何排序的知识。在英语中，“ng”音（在“sing”的结尾）从不出现在单词的开头。这种类型的现有规律性影响了我们如何处理语音：当声音序列遵循现有规则时，它们更容易被处理（例如，“fing”将成为一个合理的英语单词）而不是当违反了规则时（例如，“ngif”会成为一个可怜的词）。为了研究表征的形成和内容，我们让成人和婴儿接触新的序列，例如，将“f“限制在音节的开头。然后，我们测试他们是否以不同的方式处理以“f”开头开始和以“f”结尾的音节。如果他们这样做了，这表明他们了解了新的信息。语言的不同之处在于声音的排列方式，它们在如何发音相似的语音的细节上也有所不同，例如，在单词的开头，英语中的“p”有一股空气（送气），而法语中的“p”没有。 我们建议探索在声音序列学习过程中存储的各种细节（如吸气），以及对这些细节的注意是否受到语言经验的激励，或者是否任何类型的细节都同样可能被编码。 跨年龄比较（成人，婴儿）澄清了经验的作用，而跨语言比较使我们能够从较少依赖经验的偏见中解脱出语言经验的影响。我们的研究探索了语音习得和处理中的新问题;增加了我们对人类学习和记忆，语音感知和语言习得的基本知识。

To understand how language is learned and used we must understand how language representations are formed, the information contained in those representations, and how we appropriately extract information from them. My research program focuses on how we become competent language users; within this broader aim, the current proposal explores the formation and content of representations of speech sounds. The particular aspect of speech sounds that we have been examining is knowledge of how they are ordered. In English, the "ng" sound (at the end of "sing") never appears at the beginning of a word. This type of existing regularity affects how we process speech: sound sequences are more easily processed when they follow existing regularities (e.g., "fing" would make a reasonable English word) than when the regularities are violated (e.g., "ngif" would make a poor word). To study the formation and content of representations we expose adults and infants to novel sequence regularities, for example, restricting "f"s to the beginnings of syllables. We then test whether they treat syllables that begin with "f" and end with "f" differently. If they do, it suggests that they learned about the new regularities. Languages differ in how sounds can be ordered and they also differ in the details of how similar speech sounds are pronounced, e.g., at the beginnings of words, "p" in English has a puff of air (aspirated) while "p" in French does not. We propose to explore the kinds of details (like aspiration) that are stored during sound sequence learning, and whether attention to these details is motivated by language experience or whether any type of detail is equally likely to be encoded. Cross-age comparison (adults, infants) clarifies the role of experience while cross-language comparison allows us to disentangle the influence of language experience from biases that are less experience dependent. Our research explores novel questions in the acquisition and processing of speech sounds; adding to our basic knowledge of human learning and memory, speech perception, and language acquisition.