Liu Liquan, Kager René
School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics-OTS, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2018 Mar 15;9:117. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00117. eCollection 2018.
Previous studies reported a non-native word learning advantage for bilingual infants at around 18 months. We investigated developmental changes in infant interpretation of sounds that aid in object mapping. Dutch monolingual and bilingual (exposed to Dutch and a second non-tone-language) infants' word learning ability was examined on two novel label-object pairings using syllables differing in Mandarin tones as labels (flat vs. falling). Infants aged 14-15 months, regardless of language backgrounds, were sensitive to violations in the label-objects pairings when lexical tones were switched compared to when they were the same as habituated. Conversely at 17-18 months, neither monolingual nor bilingual infants demonstrated learning. Linking with existing literature, infants' ability to associate non-native tones with meanings may be related to tonal acoustic properties and/or perceptual assimilation to native prosodic categories. These findings provide new insights into the relation between infant tone perception, learning, and interpretative narrowing from a developmental perspective.
先前的研究报告称，18个月左右的双语婴儿在学习非母语单词方面具有优势。我们研究了婴儿对有助于物体映射的声音的理解的发展变化。使用汉语声调不同的音节（平声与降声）作为标签，对荷兰单语和双语（接触荷兰语和另一种非声调语言）婴儿在两种新颖的标签-物体配对上的单词学习能力进行了测试。14至15个月大的婴儿，无论语言背景如何，与习惯化时标签-物体配对相同的情况相比，当词汇声调切换时，他们对标签-物体配对中的违规情况很敏感。相反，在17至18个月时，单语和双语婴儿都没有表现出学习能力。与现有文献联系起来，婴儿将非母语声调与意义联系起来的能力可能与声调声学特性和/或对母语韵律类别的感知同化有关。这些发现从发展的角度为婴儿声调感知、学习和解释性缩小之间的关系提供了新的见解。
