Conwell Erin
North Dakota State University, USA.
Lang Speech. 2018 Sep;61(3):466-479. doi: 10.1177/0023830917737108. Epub 2017 Nov 3.
In natural production, adults differentiate homophones prosodically as a function of the frequency of their intended meaning. This study compares adult and child productions of homophones to determine whether prosodic differentiation of homophones changes over development. Using a picture-based story-completion paradigm, isolated tokens of homophones were elicited from English-learning children and adult native English speakers. These tokens were measured for duration, vowel duration, pitch, pitch range, and vowel quality. Results indicate that less frequent meanings of homophones are longer in duration than their more frequent counterparts in both adults and children. No other measurement differed as a function of meaning frequency. As speakers of all ages produce longer tokens of lower frequency homophones, homophone differentiation does not change over development, but is included in children's early lexicons. These findings indicate that production planning processes alone may not fully account for differences in homophone duration, but rather that the differences could be learned and represented from experience even in the early stages of lexical acquisition.
在自然产出中，成年人会根据同音异形词预期含义的出现频率，从韵律上区分这些词。本研究比较了成年人和儿童对同音异形词的产出，以确定同音异形词的韵律区分在发育过程中是否会发生变化。使用基于图片的故事完成范式，从学习英语的儿童和以英语为母语的成年 speakers 中引出同音异形词的孤立 tokens。对这些 tokens 进行时长、元音时长、音高、音高范围和元音质量的测量。结果表明，在成年人和儿童中，同音异形词中出现频率较低的含义在时长上比出现频率较高的对应词更长。没有其他测量结果因含义频率而有所不同。由于所有年龄段的 speakers 都会产出低频同音异形词的更长 tokens，同音异形词的区分在发育过程中不会改变，而是包含在儿童早期的词汇表中。这些发现表明，仅生产计划过程可能无法完全解释同音异形词时长的差异，而是这些差异甚至在词汇习得的早期阶段就可以从经验中学习和体现。
