Jo Jinyoung, Ko Eon-Suk
Department of English Language and Literature, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea.
Department of English Language and Literature, Chosun University, Gwangju, South Korea.
Front Psychol. 2018 Dec 18;9:2225. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02225. eCollection 2018.
The present study investigates Korean mothers' use of sound symbolism, in particular expressive lengthening and ideophones, in their speech directed to their children. Specifically, we explore whether the frequency and acoustic saliency of sound symbolic words are modulated by the maturity of children's linguistic ability. A total of 36 infant-mother dyads, 12 each belonging to the three groups of preverbal ( = 8-month-old), early speech ( = 13-month-old), and multiword ( = 27-month-old) stage, were recorded in a 40-min free-play session. The results were consistent with the findings in previous research that the ratio of sound symbolic words in mothers' speech decreases with child age and that they are acoustically more salient than conventional words in duration and pitch measures. We additionally found that mothers weaken the prominence for ideophones for older children in mean pitch, suggesting that such prominence of these iconic words might bootstrap infants' word learning especially when they are younger. Interestingly, however, we found that mothers maintain the acoustic saliency of expressive lengthening consistently across children's ages in all acoustic measures. There is some indication that children at age 2 are not likely to have mastered the fine details of scalar properties in certain words. Thus, it could be that they still benefit from the enhanced prosody of expressive lengthening in learning the semantic attributes of scalar adjectives, and, accordingly, mothers continue to provide redundant acoustic cues longer for expressive lengthening than ideophones.
本研究调查了韩国母亲在与孩子交谈时对语音象征的运用，特别是表达性延长和拟声词的运用。具体而言，我们探讨了语音象征词的频率和声学显著性是否会受到儿童语言能力成熟度的调节。在40分钟的自由玩耍环节中，共记录了36对母婴组合，其中每组12对，分别处于前语言阶段（8个月大）、早期语言阶段（13个月大）和多词阶段（27个月大）。研究结果与之前的研究结果一致，即母亲言语中语音象征词的比例随着孩子年龄的增长而降低，并且在时长和音高方面，它们在声学上比传统词汇更显著。我们还发现，母亲会降低对年龄较大孩子使用拟声词时的音高突出度，这表明这些象声词的突出度可能有助于婴儿的词汇学习，尤其是在他们较小的时候。然而，有趣的是，我们发现母亲在所有声学指标上，都始终保持了表达性延长在不同孩子年龄阶段的声学显著性。有迹象表明，2岁的孩子不太可能掌握某些词汇中量级属性的细微差别。因此，可能是他们在学习量级形容词的语义属性时，仍然受益于表达性延长增强的韵律，相应地，母亲在表达性延长方面，比拟声词更长时间地提供冗余的声学线索。
