Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-7988, USA.
Infant Behav Dev. 2010 Dec;33(4):419-30. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2010.04.006. Epub 2010 May 15.
To better understand how infants process complex auditory input, this study investigated whether 11-month-old infants perceive the pitch (melodic) or the phonetic (lyric) components within songs as more salient, and whether melody facilitates phonetic recognition. Using a preferential looking paradigm, uni-dimensional and multi-dimensional songs were tested; either the pitch or syllable order of the stimuli varied. As a group, infants detected a change in pitch order in a 4-note sequence when the syllables were redundant (experiment 1), but did not detect the identical pitch change with variegated syllables (experiment 2). Infants were better able to detect a change in syllable order in a sung sequence (experiment 2) than the identical syllable change in a spoken sequence (experiment 1). These results suggest that by 11 months, infants cannot "ignore" phonetic information in the context of perceptually salient pitch variation. Moreover, the increased phonetic recognition in song contexts mirrors findings that demonstrate advantages of infant-directed speech. Findings are discussed in terms of how stimulus complexity interacts with the perception of sung speech in infancy.
为了更好地理解婴儿如何处理复杂的听觉输入，本研究调查了 11 个月大的婴儿是否更能感知歌曲中的音高（旋律）或语音（歌词）成分，以及旋律是否有助于语音识别。本研究采用偏好注视范式，对单维及多维歌曲进行了测试；刺激的音高或音节顺序发生了变化。作为一个整体，当音节冗余时，婴儿在 4 个音符的序列中检测到音高顺序的变化（实验 1），但在音节变化时无法检测到相同的音高变化（实验 2）。与在口语序列中检测到相同的音节变化（实验 1）相比，婴儿在歌唱序列中能够更好地检测到音节顺序的变化（实验 2）。这些结果表明，到 11 个月大时，婴儿不能在感知上明显的音高变化的情况下“忽略”语音信息。此外，在歌曲语境中增加的语音识别与证明婴儿指向性言语优势的发现相吻合。研究结果讨论了刺激复杂性如何与婴儿对歌唱语音的感知相互作用。
