Spoken word production in early language development

孩子们成长的一个奇妙的里程碑是他们说出第一个单词的那一天。这通常发生在孩子一岁生日前后。当我们考虑到幼儿并不是天生就有说话能力的时候，口语产生的出现就更令人惊叹了。在他们生命的头12个月里，他们从最初的基于理解的知识过渡到当他们开始说话时的一个显著的发展点。在这短短的时间里，他们开始统一自己的语言理解和产出能力。这项研究解决了语言发展的一个基本问题：儿童口语产生的认知过程。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。对发展性言语产出的实证研究有助于我们理解学习者是如何完成这些基本任务的。这项研究将使用在线方法，测量产生单词所需的时间，并跟踪儿童在产生单词时的眼球运动图像。这项研究中提出的问题对我们如何理解早期语言发展具有重要意义。这些发现不仅会引起认知科学和语言科学的研究人员的兴趣，也会引起对临床评估和治疗工具感兴趣的健康从业者的兴趣。

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.