Spoken word production in early language development

孩子说出第一个单词的那一天是他们发展的一个重要里程碑。这通常发生在孩子的第一个生日左右。当我们考虑到幼儿并非生来就具有说话能力时，口语产生的出现就更加令人惊讶了。在他们生命的最初12个月里，他们从主要以理解为基础的知识过渡到一个重要的发展阶段，即他们开始说话。在这短短的时间里，他们的语言理解能力和语言创作能力开始统一起来。本研究解决了语言发展的一个基本问题：儿童口语单词产生的认知过程。学习者面临的主要挑战是发展语言的心理表征，组织这些表征，并将新的表征整合到现有的表征中。发展性言语产生的实证研究可以帮助我们理解学习者如何完成这些基本任务。这项研究将使用在线方法，测量产生一个单词所需的时间，并跟踪儿童在产生一个单词时对图像的眼球运动。本研究解决的问题对我们如何理解早期语言发展具有启示意义。这些发现不仅会引起认知和语言科学研究人员的兴趣，也会引起对临床评估和治疗工具感兴趣的健康从业人员的兴趣。

A wonderful milestone in children’s development is the day they produce their first word. This usually occurs around children’s first birthday. The emergence of spoken word production is even more amazing when we consider the fact that young children are not born with the ability to talk. Within the first 12 months of their lives, they go from having primarily comprehension-based knowledge and transition to a remarkable point in development when they begin to speak. In this short period of time, they have begun to unify their language comprehension and production abilities. This research tackles a fundamental and basic issue of language development: the cognitive processes of spoken word production in children. Central challenges to the learner are to develop mental representations of language, organize these representations, and integrate new representations into existing ones. Empirical studies of developmental speech production can help us understand how learners accomplish these fundamental tasks. This research will use on-line methods, measuring the time it takes to produce a word and tracking children’s eye movements to images as they produce a word. The questions addressed in this research have implications for how we conceive of early language development. These findings will be of interest not only to researchers in cognitive and language sciences, but also to health practitioners interested in tools for clinical assessment and therapy.