Infants' use of prosodic cues in language processing

婴儿在语言处理中使用韵律线索

基本信息

批准号：
6853500
负责人：
AMANDA H SEIDL
金额：
$ 7.04万
依托单位：
PURDUE UNIVERSITY
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
财政年份：
2004
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2004-03-01 至 2007-02-28
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6853500
关键词：
behavioral /social science research tag clinical research cues human subject infant human (0-1 year)language development neural information processing sound frequency speech recognition syntax

项目摘要

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Two years of support are requested for an investigation of the acoustic properties of speech used by an infant listener to discover the syntactic constituents of his/her language. Infants' use of speech cues for some tasks in language acquisition, for example word segmentation, has been extensively discussed in the literature. However, the use of cues in the acquisition of other units of the grammar such as the clause or phrase, has not been as extensively explored. Nonetheless, there is some evidence indicating that infants are sensitive to the strength of prosodic cues in segmentation of these larger units. For example, it has been shown that infants segment speech more easily when speech is infant-directed and hence is speech that is subject to larger pitch excursions and greater preboundary lengthening. This project has two objectives: (1) to uncover the prosodic cues infants are most sensitive to in continuous speech. (2) To find out which of these cues is most heavily weighted in infants' parsing of the speech stream into large grammatical units such as the clause. The use of cues to segment larger units (clauses and phrases) is particularly important since these units are segmented at a younger age than smaller units, such as the word. The prosodic properties of clauses are larger and more language general than smaller units, thus, they may lay the groundwork for the segmentation of smaller and more language specific units (e.g., words and phrases). Uncovering information about the weighting of cues in this early segmentation will tell us more about how infants go about segmenting these larger units and subsequently smaller units from continuous speech. In addition, segmentation of these units is a key step in language acquisition because so much information about the syntactic structure of the native language (for example, word order) may be gleaned from clauses and phrases. In a series of experiments infants' use of prosodic cues in their segmentation of clauses will be explored. The experiments feature prosodic cues one by one from both clausal and non-clausal units and examine whether infants' performance on segmentation tasks remains the same or worsens as the result of the loss of each cue or group of prosodic cues. In this way, information concerning the perceptual weighting of these cues is elucidated.

描述（由申请人提供）：需要两年的支持来调查婴儿听众所使用的语音的声学特性，以发现他/她的语言的句法成分。婴儿在语言习得的某些任务中使用语音提示（例如分词）已在文献中进行了广泛讨论。然而，在习得其他语法单元（例如从句或短语）中使用提示的方法尚未得到广泛探讨。尽管如此，有一些证据表明婴儿对这些较大单位的分割中韵律线索的强度很敏感。例如，已经表明，当语音是针对婴儿的时，婴儿更容易分段语音，因此语音会受到更大的音调偏移和更大的前边界延长。该项目有两个目标：（1）揭示婴儿在连续言语中最敏感的韵律线索。 (2) 找出这些线索中哪一个在婴儿将语音流解析成大语法单元（例如从句）时最重要。使用提示来分割较大的单元（从句和短语）尤其重要，因为这些单元的分割年龄比较小的单元（例如单词）要小。与较小的单元相比，子句的韵律属性更大并且更通用，因此，它们可以为更小和更多语言特定单元（例如单词和短语）的分割奠定基础。揭示早期分割中线索权重的信息将告诉我们更多关于婴儿如何从连续语音中分割这些较大的单位和随后的较小的单位。此外，这些单元的分段是语言习得的关键步骤，因为可以从子句和短语中收集有关母语句法结构（例如词序）的大量信息。在一系列实验中，我们将探讨婴儿在分句中使用韵律线索的情况。这些实验以来自分句和非分句单位的韵律线索为特征，并检查婴儿在分割任务上的表现是否由于每个线索或一组韵律线索的丢失而保持不变或恶化。通过这种方式，阐明了有关这些线索的感知权重的信息。