Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA.
Dev Sci. 2012 Sep;15(5):697-713. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01173.x. Epub 2012 Jul 28.
Recent research has considered the phonological specificity of children's word representations, but few studies have examined the flexibility of those representations. Tolerating acoustic-phonetic deviations has been viewed as a negative in terms of discriminating minimally different word forms, but may be a positive in an increasingly multicultural society where children encounter speakers with variable accents. To explore children's on-line processing of accented speech, preschoolers heard atypically pronounced words (e. g. 'fesh', from fish) and selected pictures from a four-item display as eye movements were tracked. Children recognized similarity between typical and accented variants, selecting the fish overwhelmingly when hearing 'fesh' (Experiment 1), even when a novel-picture alternative was present (Experiment 2). However, eye movements indicated slowed on-line recognition of accented relative to typical variants. Novel-picture selections increased with feature distance from familiar forms, but were similarly sensitive to vowel, onset, and coda changes (Experiment 3). Implications for child accent processing and mutual exclusivity are discussed.
最近的研究已经考虑了儿童单词表示的语音特异性，但很少有研究考察这些表示的灵活性。在区分最小差异的词形方面，容忍声学-语音偏差被视为负面的，但在一个日益多元文化的社会中，儿童会遇到口音各异的说话者，这可能是积极的。为了探索儿童对口音言语的在线处理，学龄前儿童听到发音异常的单词（例如“fesh”，来自 fish），并在注视追踪的同时从四项目显示中选择图片。当听到“fesh”时，儿童会识别出典型变体和口音变体之间的相似性，压倒性地选择鱼（实验 1），即使存在新图片的选择（实验 2）。然而，眼动表明，与典型变体相比，口音变体的在线识别较慢。新图片的选择随着与熟悉形式的特征距离增加而增加，但对元音、起音和尾音变化同样敏感（实验 3）。讨论了儿童口音处理和互斥性的含义。
