Conwell Erin
Department of Psychology, North Dakota State University.
Lang Learn Dev. 2017;13(3):262-273. doi: 10.1080/15475441.2016.1246248. Epub 2017 Jan 4.
Many approaches to early word learning posit that children assume a one-to-one mapping of form and meaning. However, children's early vocabularies contain homophones, words that violate that assumption. Children might learn such words by exploiting prosodic differences between homophone meanings that are associated with lemma frequency (Gahl, 2008). Such differences have not yet been documented in children's natural language experience and the exaggerated prosody of child-directed speech could either mask the subtle distinctions reported in adult-directed speech or enhance them. This study measured the duration, vowel characteristics, and pitch information of homophone tokens taken from a corpus of child-directed speech. The results show that homophone meanings are acoustically distinct in child-directed speech as a function of lemma frequency, particularly in utterance-final positions. Such distinctions may allow children to maintain separate phonetic representations of homophones until their cognitive and linguistic abilities are robust to violations of the one-to-one bias.
许多早期词汇学习的方法都假定儿童认为形式与意义是一一对应的映射关系。然而，儿童的早期词汇中包含同音异义词，这些词违背了这一假设。儿童可能通过利用与词元频率相关的同音异义词意义之间的韵律差异来学习这些词（加尔，2008年）。这种差异尚未在儿童的自然语言体验中得到记录，而儿童导向型言语中夸张的韵律可能会掩盖成人导向型言语中所报告的细微差别，也可能会增强这些差别。本研究测量了从儿童导向型言语语料库中提取的同音异义词的时长、元音特征和音高信息。结果表明，在儿童导向型言语中，同音异义词的意义在声学上因词元频率而异，尤其是在话语结尾位置。这种差异可能使儿童在其认知和语言能力能够稳健地应对一对一偏差的违背之前，维持同音异义词的不同语音表征。
