Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2012 Dec;113(4):487-509. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2012.07.007. Epub 2012 Sep 5.
Talker variability in speech influences language processing from infancy through adulthood and is inextricably embedded in the very cues that identify speech sounds. Yet little is known about developmental changes in the processing of talker information. On one account, children have not yet learned to separate speech sound variability from talker-varying cues in speech, making them more sensitive than adults to talker variation. A different account is that children are less developed than adults at recognizing speech sounds and at recognizing talkers, and development involves protracted tuning of both recognition systems. The current research presented preschoolers and adults (N=180) with voices linked to two distinct cartoon characters. After exposure, participants heard each talker and selected which character was speaking. Consistent with the protracted tuning hypothesis, children were much less accurate than adults when talkers were matched on age, gender, and dialect (Experiments 1-3), even when prosody differed (Experiment 5). Children were highly accurate when voices differed in gender (Experiment 2) or age (mother vs. daughter; Experiment 6), suggesting that greater acoustic dissimilarity facilitated encoding. Implications for speech sound processing are discussed, as are the roles of language knowledge and the nature of talker perceptual space in talker encoding.
说话者的语音变化会影响从婴儿期到成年期的语言处理，并且这些变化与识别语音的线索紧密相关。然而，对于说话者信息处理的发展变化，我们知之甚少。根据一种观点，儿童尚未学会将语音变化与语音中的说话者变化线索区分开来，因此他们比成年人对说话者的变化更为敏感。另一种观点则认为，儿童在识别语音和识别说话者方面的能力不如成年人发达，而发展则涉及这两个识别系统的长期调整。当前的研究向学龄前儿童和成年人（N=180）展示了与两个不同卡通角色相关联的声音。在暴露之后，参与者听到每个说话者并选择哪个角色在说话。与长期调整假说一致，当说话者在年龄、性别和方言上匹配时，儿童的准确性远低于成年人（实验 1-3），即使韵律不同（实验 5）。当声音在性别（实验 2）或年龄（母亲与女儿；实验 6）上存在差异时，儿童的准确性非常高，这表明更大的声学差异有助于编码。讨论了对语音处理的影响，以及语言知识的作用和说话者感知空间的性质在说话者编码中的作用。
