Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA.
Cogn Psychol. 2011 Sep;63(2):93-106. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2011.06.002. Epub 2011 Jul 16.
The processes of infant word segmentation and infant word learning have largely been studied separately. However, the ease with which potential word forms are segmented from fluent speech seems likely to influence subsequent mappings between words and their referents. To explore this process, we tested the link between the statistical coherence of sequences presented in fluent speech and infants' subsequent use of those sequences as labels for novel objects. Notably, the materials were drawn from a natural language unfamiliar to the infants (Italian). The results of three experiments suggest that there is a close relationship between the statistics of the speech stream and subsequent mapping of labels to referents. Mapping was facilitated when the labels contained high transitional probabilities in the forward and/or backward direction (Experiment 1). When no transitional probability information was available (Experiment 2), or when the internal transitional probabilities of the labels were low in both directions (Experiment 3), infants failed to link the labels to their referents. Word learning appears to be strongly influenced by infants' prior experience with the distribution of sounds that make up words in natural languages.
婴儿的单词分割和婴儿单词学习过程在很大程度上是分开研究的。然而，从流畅的语音中分割潜在单词形式的容易程度似乎会影响单词与其指称物之间的后续映射。为了探索这一过程，我们测试了在流畅的语音中呈现的序列的统计连贯性与婴儿随后将这些序列用作新对象标签的能力之间的联系。值得注意的是，这些材料取自婴儿不熟悉的自然语言（意大利语）。三个实验的结果表明，语音流的统计数据与标签到指称物的后续映射之间存在密切关系。当标签在正向和/或反向具有高转移概率时，映射会得到促进（实验 1）。当没有转移概率信息可用时（实验 2），或者当标签的内部转移概率在两个方向上都较低时（实验 3），婴儿无法将标签与其指称物联系起来。单词学习似乎受到婴儿先前对构成自然语言单词的声音分布的经验的强烈影响。
