Coady Jeffry A, Aslin Richard N
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2004 Nov;89(3):183-213. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2004.07.004.
A series of three experiments examined children's sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactic structure as reflected in the relative frequencies with which speech sounds occur and co-occur in American English. Children, ages 212 and 312 years, participated in a nonword repetition task that examined their sensitivity to the frequency of individual phonetic segments and to the frequency of combinations of segments. After partialling out ease of articulation and lexical variables, both groups of children repeated higher phonotactic frequency nonwords more accurately than they did low phonotactic frequency nonwords, suggesting sensitivity to phoneme frequency. In addition, sensitivity to individual phonetic segments increased with age. Finally, older children, but not younger children, were sensitive to the frequency of larger (diphone) units. These results suggest not only that young children are sensitive to fine-grained acoustic-phonetic information in the developing lexicon but also that sensitivity to all aspects of the sound structure increases over development. Implications for the acoustic nature of both developing and mature lexical representations are discussed.
一系列三个实验考察了儿童对概率性音位结构的敏感度，这种敏感度体现在美国英语中语音出现和同时出现的相对频率上。年龄在2岁12个月至3岁12个月的儿童参与了一项非词重复任务，该任务考察了他们对单个语音片段频率以及片段组合频率的敏感度。在排除发音难易程度和词汇变量后，两组儿童对音位频率较高的非词的重复准确率都高于音位频率较低的非词，这表明他们对音素频率敏感。此外，对单个语音片段的敏感度随年龄增长而提高。最后，年龄较大的儿童（而非年龄较小的儿童）对更大的（双音素）单元频率敏感。这些结果不仅表明幼儿在发展中的词汇中对精细的声学语音信息敏感，而且对语音结构各方面的敏感度在发展过程中都会提高。文中还讨论了这些结果对发展中和成熟的词汇表征的声学性质的影响。
