Falk Simone, Kello Christopher T
Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany; Laboratoire Parole et Langage, UMR 7309, CNRS / Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France; Laboratoire Phonétique et Phonologie, UMR 7018, CNRS / Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris-3, Paris, France.
University of California, Merced, USA.
Cognition. 2017 Jun;163:80-86. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.02.017. Epub 2017 Mar 11.
Caregivers alter the temporal structure of their utterances when talking and singing to infants compared with adult communication. The present study tested whether temporal variability in infant-directed registers serves to emphasize the hierarchical temporal structure of speech. Fifteen German-speaking mothers sang a play song and told a story to their 6-months-old infants, or to an adult. Recordings were analyzed using a recently developed method that determines the degree of nested clustering of temporal events in speech. Events were defined as peaks in the amplitude envelope, and clusters of various sizes related to periods of acoustic speech energy at varying timescales. Infant-directed speech and song clearly showed greater event clustering compared with adult-directed registers, at multiple timescales of hundreds of milliseconds to tens of seconds. We discuss the relation of this newly discovered acoustic property to temporal variability in linguistic units and its potential implications for parent-infant communication and infants learning the hierarchical structures of speech and language.
与和成年人交流相比，照顾者在与婴儿交谈和唱歌时会改变话语的时间结构。本研究测试了面向婴儿的语域中的时间变异性是否有助于强调言语的层次时间结构。15位说德语的母亲分别给她们6个月大的婴儿或一位成年人唱了一首儿歌并讲了一个故事。使用一种最近开发的方法对录音进行分析，该方法可确定言语中时间事件的嵌套聚类程度。事件被定义为振幅包络中的峰值，以及与不同时间尺度上的声学语音能量周期相关的各种大小的聚类。与面向成年人的语域相比，面向婴儿的言语和歌曲在数百毫秒到数十秒的多个时间尺度上明显表现出更大的事件聚类。我们讨论了这种新发现的声学特性与语言单位中时间变异性的关系，以及它对亲子交流和婴儿学习言语和语言层次结构的潜在影响。
