Nazzi Thierry, Kemler Nelson Deborah G, Jusczyk Peter W, Jusczyk Ann Marie
Institute of Human Development University of California at Berkeley.
Department of Psychology Swarthmore College.
Infancy. 2000 Jan;1(1):123-147. doi: 10.1207/S15327078IN0101_11. Epub 2000 Jan 1.
Three experiments investigated the role of prosodic structure for infants' recognition of embedded word sequences. Six-month-olds were familiarized with 2 versions of the same sequence, 1 corresponding to a well-formed prosodic unit and the other to a prosodically ill-formed sequence (although a successive word series). Next, infants heard 2 test passages. One included the well-formed unit, and the other included the ill-formed sequence. In Experiment 1, infants listened longer to the passage containing the well-formed unit, suggesting that such units, even when they are embedded, are better recognized. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this better recognition does not depend on an acoustic match between the familiarized sequences and their later embeddings. This suggests that the advantage of the well-formed unit is at least partially due to infants' use of prosody to parse continuous speech.
三项实验研究了韵律结构在婴儿识别嵌入单词序列中的作用。六个月大的婴儿熟悉同一序列的两个版本，一个对应于一个结构良好的韵律单元，另一个对应于一个韵律结构不良的序列（尽管是连续的单词系列）。接下来，婴儿听两段测试段落。一段包含结构良好的单元，另一段包含结构不良的序列。在实验1中，婴儿听包含结构良好单元的段落的时间更长，这表明即使这些单元是嵌入的，也能被更好地识别。实验2和3表明，这种更好的识别并不取决于熟悉序列与其后来嵌入内容之间的声学匹配。这表明结构良好的单元的优势至少部分归因于婴儿利用韵律来解析连续的语音。
