Ota Mitsuhiko, Yamane Naoto, Mazuka Reiko
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Laboratory for Language Development, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Japan.
Front Psychol. 2018 Jan 12;8:2354. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02354. eCollection 2017.
Learners of lexical tone languages (e.g., Mandarin) develop sensitivity to tonal contrasts and recognize pitch-matched, but not pitch-mismatched, familiar words by 11 months. Learners of non-tone languages (e.g., English) also show a tendency to treat pitch patterns as lexically contrastive up to about 18 months. In this study, we examined if this early-developing capacity to lexically encode pitch variations enables infants to acquire a pitch accent system, in which pitch-based lexical contrasts are obscured by the interaction of lexical and non-lexical (i.e., intonational) features. Eighteen 17-month-olds learning Tokyo Japanese were tested on their recognition of familiar words with the expected pitch or the lexically opposite pitch pattern. In early trials, infants were faster in shifting their eyegaze from the distractor object to the target object than in shifting from the target to distractor in the pitch-matched condition. In later trials, however, infants showed faster distractor-to-target than target-to-distractor shifts in both the pitch-matched and pitch-mismatched conditions. We interpret these results to mean that, in a pitch-accent system, the ability to use pitch variations to recognize words is still in a nascent state at 17 months.
声调语言（如普通话）的学习者在11个月大时就能对声调对比产生敏感度，并识别出音高匹配而非音高不匹配的熟悉词汇。非声调语言（如英语）的学习者在大约18个月大之前也表现出将音高模式视为词汇对比的倾向。在本研究中，我们探究了这种早期发展起来的对音高变化进行词汇编码的能力是否能使婴儿习得一种音高重音系统，在这种系统中，基于音高的词汇对比会因词汇和非词汇（即语调）特征的相互作用而变得模糊。对18名学习东京日语的17个月大婴儿进行测试，看他们对具有预期音高或词汇相反音高模式的熟悉词汇的识别情况。在早期试验中，在音高匹配条件下，婴儿将视线从干扰物体转移到目标物体的速度比从目标转移到干扰物体的速度更快。然而，在后期试验中，在音高匹配和音高不匹配条件下，婴儿从干扰物体到目标物体的转移速度都比从目标物体到干扰物体的转移速度更快。我们将这些结果解释为，在音高重音系统中，17个月大的婴儿利用音高变化识别单词的能力仍处于初始状态。
