Conboy Barbara T, Sommerville Jessica A, Kuhl Patricia K
Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98103, USA.
Dev Psychol. 2008 Sep;44(5):1505-12. doi: 10.1037/a0012975.
The development of speech perception during the 1st year reflects increasing attunement to native language features, but the mechanisms underlying this development are not completely understood. One previous study linked reductions in nonnative speech discrimination to performance on nonlinguistic tasks, whereas other studies have shown associations between speech perception and vocabulary growth. The present study examined relationships among these abilities in 11-month-old infants using a conditioned head-turn test of native and nonnative speech sound discrimination, nonlinguistic object-retrieval tasks requiring attention and inhibitory control, and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (L. Fenson et al., 1993). Native speech discrimination was positively linked to receptive vocabulary size but not to the cognitive control tasks, whereas nonnative speech discrimination was negatively linked to cognitive control scores but not to vocabulary size. Speech discrimination, vocabulary size, and cognitive control scores were not associated with more general cognitive measures. These results suggest specific relationships between domain-general inhibitory control processes and the ability to ignore variation in speech that is irrelevant to the native language and between the development of native language speech perception and vocabulary.
第一年期间言语感知的发展反映出对母语特征的适应不断增强，但这种发展背后的机制尚未完全明了。之前的一项研究将非母语语音辨别能力的下降与非语言任务的表现联系起来，而其他研究则表明言语感知与词汇增长之间存在关联。本研究使用对母语和非母语语音辨别进行条件性转头测试、需要注意力和抑制控制的非语言物体检索任务以及麦克阿瑟-贝茨交流发展量表（L. 芬森等人，1993年），检验了11个月大婴儿这些能力之间的关系。母语语音辨别与接受性词汇量呈正相关，但与认知控制任务无关，而非母语语音辨别与认知控制得分呈负相关，但与词汇量无关。语音辨别、词汇量和认知控制得分与更一般的认知测量指标无关。这些结果表明，领域一般性抑制控制过程与忽略与母语无关的语音变化的能力之间存在特定关系，以及母语语音感知发展与词汇之间存在特定关系。
