Gierut Judith A, Dale Rachel A
Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405-7002, USA.
Clin Linguist Phon. 2007 Jun;21(6):423-33. doi: 10.1080/02699200701299891.
Statistical regularities in language have been examined for new insight to the language acquisition process. This line of study has aided theory advancement, but it also has raised methodological concerns about the applicability of corpora data to child populations. One issue is whether it is appropriate to extend the regularities observed in the speech of adults to developing linguistic systems. The purpose of this paper is to establish the comparability of lexical corpora in accounting for behavioural effects of word frequency on children's phonological generalization. Four word frequency corpora were evaluated in comparison of child/adult and written/spoken sources. These were applied post-hoc to generalization data previously reported for two preschool children. Results showed that the interpretation of phonological generalization was the same within and across children, regardless of the corpus being used. Phonological gains were more evident in low than high frequency words. The findings have implications for the design of probabilistic studies of language acquisition and clinical treatment programmes.
人们已经对语言中的统计规律进行了研究，以期获得对语言习得过程的新见解。这一研究方向推动了理论的发展，但也引发了关于语料库数据在儿童群体中适用性的方法学问题。一个问题是，将在成人言语中观察到的规律扩展到正在发展的语言系统是否合适。本文的目的是确定词汇语料库在解释词频对儿童语音泛化的行为影响方面的可比性。对四个词频语料库进行了评估，比较了儿童/成人以及书面/口头来源。这些语料库被事后应用于先前报道的两名学龄前儿童的泛化数据。结果表明，无论使用哪个语料库，儿童内部和儿童之间对语音泛化的解释都是相同的。低频词比高频词的语音收获更明显。这些发现对语言习得概率研究和临床治疗方案的设计具有启示意义。
