Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, The Ohio State University, United States.
Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, United States.
Infant Behav Dev. 2021 Feb;62:101524. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2020.101524. Epub 2020 Dec 26.
Research has identified bivariate correlations between speech perception and cognitive measures gathered during infancy as well as correlations between these individual measures and later language outcomes. However, these correlations have not all been explored together in prospective longitudinal studies. The goal of the current research was to compare how early speech perception and cognitive skills predict later language outcomes using a within-participant design. To achieve this goal, we tested 97 5- to 7-month-olds on two speech perception tasks (stress pattern preference, native vowel discrimination) and two cognitive tasks (visual recognition memory, A-not-B) and later assessed their vocabulary outcomes at 18 and 24 months. Frequentist statistical analyses showed that only native vowel discrimination significantly predicted vocabulary. However, Bayesian analyses suggested that evidence was ambiguous between null and alternative hypotheses for all infant predictors. These results highlight the importance of recognizing and addressing challenges related to infant data collection, interpretation, and replication in the developmental field, a roadblock in our route to understanding the contribution of domain-specific and domain-general skills for language acquisition. Future methodological development and research along similar lines is encouraged to assess individual differences in infant speech perception and cognitive skills and their predictability for language development.
研究已经确定了婴儿期同时收集的言语感知和认知测量之间的双变量相关性，以及这些个体测量与后期语言结果之间的相关性。然而，这些相关性并没有在前瞻性纵向研究中全部进行探讨。本研究的目的是使用参与者内设计比较早期的言语感知和认知技能如何预测后期的语言结果。为了实现这一目标，我们在两项言语感知任务（重音模式偏好、母语元音辨别）和两项认知任务（视觉识别记忆、A 不 B）上测试了 97 名 5 至 7 个月大的婴儿，然后在 18 个月和 24 个月时评估他们的词汇量。经典统计学分析表明，只有母语元音辨别能力显著预测词汇量。然而，贝叶斯分析表明，对于所有婴儿预测因素，零假设和替代假设之间的证据都存在模棱两可。这些结果强调了在发展领域中，认识和解决与婴儿数据收集、解释和复制相关的挑战的重要性，这是我们理解特定领域和一般领域技能对语言习得的贡献的道路上的一个障碍。鼓励沿着类似的思路进行未来的方法学发展和研究，以评估婴儿言语感知和认知技能的个体差异及其对语言发展的可预测性。
