Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, 1417 Northeast 42nd Street, Seattle, Washington 98105, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2018 Oct;144(4):2052. doi: 10.1121/1.5058397.
This experiment investigated the effect of onset asynchrony on the segregation of concurrent vowels in infants and adults. Two vowels, randomly chosen from seven American-English vowels, were superimposed. Each vowel pair contained one vowel by a male and one by a female talker. A train of such vowel pairs was presented to listeners, who were trained to respond to the male target vowel /i:/ or /u:/. The ability to identify the target vowel was compared among three conditions: synchronous onset, 100-, and 200-ms onset asynchrony. Experiment 1 measured performance, in ', in 7-month-old infants and adults. Infants and adults performed better with asynchronous than synchronous vowel onset, regardless of asynchrony duration. Experiment 2 compared the proportion of 3-month-old infants achieving an 80% correct criterion with and without onset asynchrony. Significantly more infants reached criterion with asynchronous than with synchronous vowel onset. Asynchrony duration did not influence performance. These experiments show that infants, as young as 3 months old, benefit from onset asynchrony.
本实验研究了起始时间差对婴儿和成人并发元音分离的影响。从七个美式英语元音中随机选择两个元音进行叠加。每个元音对由一名男性和一名女性说话者发出的一个元音组成。听众会接收到这样的元音对的音流，他们被训练对男性目标元音 /i:/ 或 /u:/ 做出反应。在三种条件下比较了识别目标元音的能力：同步起始、100-ms 和 200-ms 起始时间差。实验 1 测量了 7 个月大的婴儿和成年人的表现。无论时间差如何，婴儿和成年人在异步起始的情况下表现都优于同步起始。实验 2 比较了有和没有起始时间差时，3 个月大的婴儿达到 80%正确标准的比例。具有异步起始的婴儿达到标准的比例显著高于具有同步起始的婴儿。起始时间差的持续时间对表现没有影响。这些实验表明，即使是只有 3 个月大的婴儿也能从起始时间差中受益。
