Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Meliora Hall, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Apr 12;108(15):6038-43. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1017617108. Epub 2011 Mar 28.
Human infants are predisposed to rapidly acquire their native language. The nature of these predispositions is poorly understood, but is crucial to our understanding of how infants unpack their speech input to recover the fundamental word-like units, assign them referential roles, and acquire the rules that govern their organization. Previous researchers have demonstrated the role of general distributional computations in prelinguistic infants' parsing of continuous speech. We extend these findings to more naturalistic conditions, and find that 6-mo-old infants can simultaneously segment a nonce auditory word form from prosodically organized continuous speech and associate it to a visual referent. Crucially, however, this mapping occurs only when the word form is aligned with a prosodic phrase boundary. Our findings suggest that infants are predisposed very early in life to hypothesize that words are aligned with prosodic phrase boundaries, thus facilitating the word learning process. Further, and somewhat paradoxically, we observed successful learning in a more complex context than previously studied, suggesting that learning is enhanced when the language input is well matched to the learner's expectations.
人类婴儿天生就具备快速掌握母语的能力。这些先天倾向的本质尚不清楚，但对于我们理解婴儿如何从言语输入中解开基本的单词单元、赋予它们指称作用、并习得支配其组织的规则至关重要。先前的研究人员已经证明了一般分布计算在预语言婴儿对连续言语的分析中的作用。我们将这些发现扩展到更自然的条件下，并发现 6 个月大的婴儿可以从韵律组织的连续言语中同时分割出一个非特定的听觉单词形式，并将其与视觉参照物联系起来。然而，至关重要的是，只有当单词形式与韵律短语边界对齐时，才会发生这种映射。我们的发现表明，婴儿在生命的早期就倾向于假设单词与韵律短语边界对齐，从而促进了单词学习过程。此外，有些自相矛盾的是，我们在比以前研究更复杂的情况下观察到了成功的学习，这表明当语言输入与学习者的期望很好地匹配时，学习会得到增强。
