Delle Luche Claire, Floccia Caroline, Granjon Lionel, Nazzi Thierry
Department of Languages and Linguistics, University of Essex.
School of Psychology, Plymouth University.
Infancy. 2017 May;22(3):362-388. doi: 10.1111/infa.12151. Epub 2016 Jul 2.
By the end of their first year of life, infants' representations of familiar words contain phonetic detail; yet little is known about the nature of these representations at the very beginning of word learning. Bouchon et al. () showed that French-learning 5-month-olds could detect a vowel change in their own name and not a consonant change, but also that infants reacted to the acoustic distance between vowels. Here, we tested British English-learning 5-month-olds in a similar study to examine whether the acoustic/phonological characteristics of the native language shape the nature of the acoustic/phonetic cues that infants pay attention to. In the first experiment, British English-learning infants failed to recognize their own name compared to a mispronunciation of initial consonant (e.g., Molly versus Nolly) or vowel (e.g., April versus Ipril). Yet in the second experiment, they did so when the contrasted name was phonetically dissimilar (e.g., Sophie versus Amber). Differences in phoneme category (stops versus continuants) between the correct consonant versus the incorrect one significantly predicted infants' own name recognition in the first experiment. Altogether, these data suggest that infants might enter into a phonetic mode of processing through different paths depending on the acoustic characteristics of their native language.
在一岁末时，婴儿对熟悉单词的表征包含语音细节；然而，对于单词学习刚开始时这些表征的本质，我们却知之甚少。布雄等人（）表明，学习法语的5个月大婴儿能够察觉到自己名字中的元音变化，而非辅音变化，而且婴儿会对元音之间的声学距离做出反应。在此，我们在一项类似研究中测试了学习英式英语的5个月大婴儿，以检验母语的声学/音系特征是否会塑造婴儿所关注的声学/语音线索的本质。在第一个实验中，与首字母辅音（如莫莉与诺莉）或元音（如阿普里尔与伊普里尔）的错误发音相比，学习英式英语的婴儿无法识别自己的名字。然而在第二个实验中，当对比的名字在语音上不相似时（如索菲与安伯），他们能够识别。在第一个实验中，正确辅音与错误辅音之间的音素类别（塞音与擦音）差异显著预测了婴儿对自己名字的识别。总体而言，这些数据表明，婴儿可能会根据母语的声学特征通过不同路径进入语音处理模式。
