Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Infancy. 2020 Sep;25(5):699-718. doi: 10.1111/infa.12357. Epub 2020 Aug 13.
Infants exploit acoustic boundaries to perceptually organize phrases in speech. This prosodic parsing ability is well-attested and is a cornerstone to the development of speech perception and grammar. However, infants also receive linguistic input in child songs. This study provides evidence that infants parse songs into meaningful phrasal units and replicates previous research for speech. Six-month-old Dutch infants (n = 80) were tested in the song or speech modality in the head-turn preference procedure. First, infants were familiarized to two versions of the same word sequence: One version represented a well-formed unit, and the other contained a phrase boundary halfway through. At test, infants were presented two passages, each containing one version of the familiarized sequence. The results for speech replicated the previously observed preference for the passage containing the well-formed sequence, but only in a more fine-grained analysis. The preference for well-formed phrases was also observed in the song modality, indicating that infants recognize phrase structure in song. There were acoustic differences between stimuli of the current and previous studies, suggesting that infants are flexible in their processing of boundary cues while also providing a possible explanation for differences in effect sizes.
婴儿利用声学边界来感知组织言语中的短语。这种韵律分析能力得到了充分证实，是语音感知和语法发展的基石。然而，婴儿也会从儿童歌曲中获得语言输入。本研究提供了婴儿将歌曲解析成语义短语单元的证据，并且复制了之前关于言语的研究。6 个月大的荷兰婴儿（n=80）在转头偏好程序中接受歌曲或言语模态的测试。首先，婴儿熟悉了同一个单词序列的两个版本：一个版本代表一个完整的单元，另一个版本在中途包含一个短语边界。在测试中，婴儿呈现了两段包含熟悉序列的一个版本的段落。言语的结果复制了之前观察到的对完整序列段落的偏好，但只是在更精细的分析中。在歌曲模态中也观察到了对完整短语的偏好，表明婴儿在歌曲中识别短语结构。当前和以前研究的刺激之间存在声学差异，这表明婴儿在处理边界线索时具有灵活性，同时也为效应大小的差异提供了可能的解释。
