Frost Rebecca L A, Jessop Andrew, Durrant Samantha, Peter Michelle S, Bidgood Amy, Pine Julian M, Rowland Caroline F, Monaghan Padraic
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands.
Cogn Psychol. 2020 Aug;120:101291. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101291. Epub 2020 Mar 19.
To acquire language, infants must learn how to identify words and linguistic structure in speech. Statistical learning has been suggested to assist both of these tasks. However, infants' capacity to use statistics to discover words and structure together remains unclear. Further, it is not yet known how infants' statistical learning ability relates to their language development. We trained 17-month-old infants on an artificial language comprising non-adjacent dependencies, and examined their looking times on tasks assessing sensitivity to words and structure using an eye-tracked head-turn-preference paradigm. We measured infants' vocabulary size using a Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) concurrently and at 19, 21, 24, 25, 27, and 30 months to relate performance to language development. Infants could segment the words from speech, demonstrated by a significant difference in looking times to words versus part-words. Infants' segmentation performance was significantly related to their vocabulary size (receptive and expressive) both currently, and over time (receptive until 24 months, expressive until 30 months), but was not related to the rate of vocabulary growth. The data also suggest infants may have developed sensitivity to generalised structure, indicating similar statistical learning mechanisms may contribute to the discovery of words and structure in speech, but this was not related to vocabulary size.
为了习得语言，婴儿必须学会如何在言语中识别单词和语言结构。有研究表明统计学习有助于完成这两项任务。然而，婴儿利用统计信息同时发现单词和结构的能力仍不明确。此外，婴儿的统计学习能力与他们的语言发展之间的关系也尚不清楚。我们对17个月大的婴儿进行了一种包含非相邻依存关系的人工语言训练，并使用眼动追踪转头偏好范式，通过评估他们在单词和结构敏感性任务上的注视时间来进行研究。我们同时以及在婴儿19、21、24、25、27和30个月大时，使用交流发展量表（CDI）测量婴儿的词汇量，以将表现与语言发展联系起来。婴儿能够从言语中分割出单词，这表现为他们对单词和部分单词的注视时间存在显著差异。婴儿的分割表现目前以及随着时间推移（接受性词汇量直到24个月，表达性词汇量直到30个月）都与他们的词汇量（接受性和表达性）显著相关，但与词汇增长速度无关。数据还表明婴儿可能已经对广义结构产生了敏感性，这表明类似的统计学习机制可能有助于在言语中发现单词和结构，但这与词汇量无关。
