Perception and Processing of Prosodic Information in Infancy

为了成功地掌握语言，孩子必须学习单词--它们是什么，什么样的声音组合构成一个可能的单词--他们必须学习单词如何组合在一起形成句子。值得注意的是，婴儿在出生后的头2年内获得了大量的语言。我的研究探讨了婴儿如何在能够说话之前就开始理解周围的语言。 一个婴儿可以“引导”习得的方法是注意到言语中高度突出的信息。特别是，婴儿注意并喜欢听语言的节奏。节奏是语音的韵律属性的一部分，它还包括单词重音（夸张的音节，如单词“baby”的第一部分）。韵律信息突出了语言结构，如短语和句子边界。我的研究的首要目标是测试如何感知和处理韵律信息-特别是单词重音-促进检测语音输入中的语言结构和引导单词学习。 本研究旨在解释婴儿获得词汇知识的动态过程，并阐明婴儿学习词汇的机制。对单词学习过程的全面探索涉及到对多种影响来源的考虑，从基本的言语感知到使用复杂的结构来建立单词-所指关系，例如婴儿使用句子来收集单词含义。拟议的实验反映了这些多层次的影响早期单词学习。由于语言系统（声音、单词、意义、句子）的复杂性，确定婴儿在生命的最初几年中何时以及如何识别和建立结构将有助于发展和语言处理的理论和模型的进步。我的发现将引起认知和发展心理学家的兴趣，并且将引起NSE科学家的特别兴趣，因为理解言语发展对于发现行为的神经和生理基础以及语音技术的进步（如语音识别系统）是必要的。

To successfully acquire language, a child must learn about words - what they are and what sound combinations make a possible word - and they must learn how words group together to form sentences. Remarkably, infants acquire a great deal of their language within the first 2 years of life. My research examines how babies begin to make sense of the language around them even before they are able to speak. One way an infant can 'bootstrap' acquisition is by attending to highly salient information in speech. In particular, babies attend to and like listening to the rhythm of language. Rhythm is part of the prosodic property of speech, which also includes word stress (exaggerated syllables, such as the first part of the word 'baby'). Prosodic information highlights linguistic structure such as phrases and sentence boundaries. The overarching goal of my research is to test how the perception and processing of prosodic information - specifically word stress - facilitates the detection of linguistic structure in the speech input and bootstraps word learning. This research program endeavours to explain the dynamic process of acquiring word knowledge and to elucidate the mechanisms that infants use to learn about words. A comprehensive exploration of the processes underlying word learning involves consideration of multiple sources of influence, from basic speech perception, to the use of complex structures to establish word-referent relationships, such as infants' use of sentences to glean word meaning. The proposed experiments reflect these multiple levels of influence on early word learning. With the complexity of the language system (sounds, words, meanings, sentences), determining when and how infants identify and build structure over the first years of life will contribute to the advancement of theories and models of development and language processing in general. My findings will be of interest to cognitive and developmental psychologists, and will be of particular interest to NSE scientists because understanding speech development is necessary for discovering neurological and physiological underpinnings of the behaviour and for the advancement of speech technologies, such as speech recognition systems.