Seidl Amanda, Tincoff Ruth, Baker Christopher, Cristia Alejandrina
Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, USA.
Dev Sci. 2015 Jan;18(1):155-64. doi: 10.1111/desc.12182. Epub 2014 Apr 16.
The lexicon of 6-month-olds is comprised of names and body part words. Unlike names, body part words do not often occur in isolation in the input. This presents a puzzle: How have infants been able to pull out these words from the continuous stream of speech at such a young age? We hypothesize that caregivers' interactions directed at and on the infant's body may be at the root of their early acquisition of body part words. An artificial language segmentation study shows that experimenter-provided synchronous tactile cues help 4-month-olds to find words in continuous speech. A follow-up study suggests that this facilitation cannot be reduced to the highly social situation in which the directed interaction occurs. Taken together, these studies suggest that direct caregiver-infant interaction, exemplified in this study by touch cues, may play a key role in infants' ability to find word boundaries, and suggests that early vocabulary items may consist of words often linked with caregiver touches. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://youtu.be/NfCj5ipatyE.
6个月大婴儿的词汇表由名字和身体部位的词汇组成。与名字不同，身体部位的词汇在输入中并不经常单独出现。这就产生了一个谜题：婴儿在如此小的年纪是如何从连续的语音流中提取出这些词汇的呢？我们推测，照顾者针对婴儿身体并与之进行的互动可能是他们早期习得身体部位词汇的根源。一项人工语言分割研究表明，实验者提供的同步触觉线索有助于4个月大的婴儿在连续语音中找到词汇。一项后续研究表明，这种促进作用不能简单归结为发生定向互动的高度社交情境。综合来看，这些研究表明，照顾者与婴儿的直接互动（在本研究中以触觉线索为例）可能在婴儿找到词汇边界的能力中起关键作用，并且表明早期词汇项目可能由经常与照顾者触摸相关联的词汇组成。本文的视频摘要可在http://youtu.be/NfCj5ipatyE观看。
