Thiessen Erik D, Saffran Jenny R
Department of Psychology and Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin--Madison, 53706, USA.
Dev Psychol. 2003 Jul;39(4):706-16. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.39.4.706.
Prior research suggests that stress cues are particularly important for English-hearing infants' detection of word boundaries. It is unclear, though, how infants learn to attend to stress as a cue to word segmentation. This series of experiments was designed to explore infants' attention to conflicting cues at different ages. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings: When stress and statistical cues indicated different word boundaries, 9-month-old infants used syllable stress as a cue to segmentation while ignoring statistical cues. However, in Experiment 2, 7-month-old infants attended more to statistical cues than to stress cues. These results raise the possibility that infants use their statistical learning abilities to locate words in speech and use those words to discover the regular pattern of stress cues in English. Infants at different ages may deploy different segmentation strategies as a function of their current linguistic experience.
先前的研究表明，重音线索对于听英语的婴儿检测单词边界尤为重要。然而，目前尚不清楚婴儿是如何学会将重音作为单词切分的线索的。这一系列实验旨在探究不同年龄段婴儿对相互冲突线索的注意力。实验1重复了先前的研究结果：当重音和统计线索表明不同的单词边界时，9个月大的婴儿将音节重音作为切分线索，而忽略统计线索。然而，在实验2中，7个月大的婴儿更关注统计线索而非重音线索。这些结果增加了一种可能性，即婴儿利用他们的统计学习能力在语音中定位单词，并利用这些单词来发现英语中重音线索的规律模式。不同年龄段的婴儿可能会根据他们当前的语言经验采用不同的切分策略。
