Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, 1300 York Ave., Box 140, New York, New York 10065, USA.
Dev Psychobiol. 2012 Sep;54(6):632-42. doi: 10.1002/dev.20611. Epub 2012 Jun 19.
It is clear that the ability to learn new speech contrasts changes over development, such that learning to categorize speech sounds as native speakers of a language do is more difficult in adulthood than it is earlier in development. There is also a wealth of data concerning changes in the perception of speech sounds during infancy, such that infants quite rapidly progress from language-general to more language-specific perceptual biases. It is often suggested that the perceptual narrowing observed during infancy plays a causal role in the loss of plasticity observed in adulthood, but the relationship between these two phenomena is complicated. Here I consider the relationship between changes in sensitivity to speech sound categorization over the first 2 years of life, when they appear to reorganize quite rapidly, to the "long tail" of development throughout childhood, in the context of understanding the sensitive period for speech perception.
很明显，学习新的语音对比的能力在发展过程中会发生变化，因此，对于成年人来说，像母语使用者那样对语音进行分类要比在发展早期更难。也有大量关于婴儿期言语感知变化的数据，例如，婴儿会很快从语言一般的感知偏向转变为更具语言特异性的感知偏向。人们常常认为，婴儿期观察到的感知变窄在成年期观察到的可塑性丧失中起着因果作用，但这两种现象之间的关系很复杂。在这里，我考虑了在生命的头 2 年中，对语音分类敏感性的变化与整个儿童期“长尾”发展之间的关系，在理解言语感知敏感期的背景下。
