Nazzi Thierry, Polka Linda
Université Paris Descartes, 75006 Paris, France; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Institut Pluridisciplinaire des Saints Pères, 75270 Paris, France.
School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Montréal, Quebec H3A 1G1, Canada; Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, McGill University, Montréal, Quebec H3A 1G1, Canada.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2018 Oct;174:103-111. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.05.011. Epub 2018 Jun 17.
The current study used an object manipulation task to explore whether infants rely more on consonant information than on vowel information when learning new words even when the words start with a vowel. Canadian French-learning 20-month-olds, who were taught pairs of new vowel-initial words contrasted either on their initial vowel (opsi/eupsi) or following consonant (oupsa/outsa), were found to have learned the words only in the consonant condition and performed significantly better in the consonant condition than in the vowel condition. These results extend to Canadian French-learning infants the consonant bias in word learning previously found in French-learning infants from France and, crucially, shows that vocalic information has less weight than consonant information in new word learning even when it is the initial sound of the target words, confirming the consonant bias at the lexical level postulated by Nespor et al. (2003). The current findings also suggest that French-learning infants are able to segment vowel-initial words as early as 20 months of age.
当前的研究使用了一项物体操作任务，以探究婴儿在学习新单词时，即使单词以元音开头，是否更多地依赖辅音信息而非元音信息。研究人员对20个月大学习加拿大法语的婴儿进行了实验，教给他们成对的以元音开头的新单词，这些单词在初始元音（opsi/eupsi）或后续辅音（oupsa/outsa）上形成对比。结果发现，这些婴儿仅在辅音条件下学会了这些单词，并且在辅音条件下的表现明显优于元音条件。这些结果将先前在法国学习法语的婴儿中发现的单词学习中的辅音偏好扩展到了学习加拿大法语的婴儿身上，并且至关重要的是，表明在新单词学习中，元音信息的权重低于辅音信息，即使它是目标单词的初始音，这证实了内斯波尔等人（2003年）假设的词汇层面的辅音偏好。当前的研究结果还表明，学习法语的婴儿早在20个月大时就能对以元音开头的单词进行切分。
