Maye Jessica, Weiss Daniel J, Aslin Richard N
Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University, USA.
Dev Sci. 2008 Jan;11(1):122-34. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00653.x.
Over the course of the first year of life, infants develop from being generalized listeners, capable of discriminating both native and non-native speech contrasts, into specialized listeners whose discrimination patterns closely reflect the phonetic system of the native language(s). Recent work by Maye, Werker and Gerken (2002) has proposed a statistical account for this phenomenon, showing that infants may lose the ability to discriminate some foreign language contrasts on the basis of their sensitivity to the statistical distribution of sounds in the input language. In this paper we examine the process of enhancement in infant speech perception, whereby initially difficult phonetic contrasts become better discriminated when they define two categories that serve a functional role in the native language. In particular, we demonstrate that exposure to a bimodal statistical distribution in 8-month-old infants' phonetic input can lead to increased discrimination of difficult contrasts. In addition, this exposure also facilitates discrimination of an unfamiliar contrast sharing the same phonetic feature as the contrast presented during familiarization, suggesting that infants extract acoustic/phonetic information that is invariant across an abstract featural representation.
在生命的第一年里，婴儿从能够辨别母语和非母语语音差异的泛化听众，发展成为辨别模式紧密反映母语语音系统的专门听众。梅耶、韦克和格肯（2002年）最近的研究提出了一种对这一现象的统计学解释，表明婴儿可能会基于对输入语言中声音统计分布的敏感度，而丧失辨别某些外语语音差异的能力。在本文中，我们研究了婴儿语音感知增强的过程，即当最初难以辨别的语音差异用于定义母语中两个具有功能作用的类别时，就会变得更容易辨别。特别是，我们证明，让8个月大婴儿的语音输入接触双峰统计分布，会导致对困难语音差异的辨别能力增强。此外，这种接触还促进了对与熟悉过程中呈现的语音差异具有相同语音特征的不熟悉语音差异的辨别，这表明婴儿提取了跨抽象特征表征不变的声学/语音信息。
