Institute for Maternal and Child Health - IRCCS "Burlo Garofolo" - Trieste, Italy.
NeuroSpin Research Center, CEA, Paris, France.
Cognition. 2021 Aug;213:104686. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104686. Epub 2021 Jun 18.
One of the prominent ideas developed by Jacques Mehler and his colleagues was that perceptual tuning, present from birth on, enables infants, and language learners in general, to extract regularities from speech input. Here we discuss language learners'' ability to extract basic word order (VO or OV) structure from prosodic regularities in a language. The two are closely related: in phonological phrases of VO languages, the most prominent word is the rightmost one, and in OV languages, it is the leftmost one. In speech, this prominence is realized as extended duration, or as elevated pitch, sometimes combined with changes in intensity. When learning the first (L1) or the second language (L2), exposure to relevant rhythmic structure elicits implicit learning about syntactic structure, including the basic word order. However, it remains unclear whether triggering the learning process requires a certain level of familiarity with the relevant rhythm. It is moreover unknown whether prosodic information can help L2 learners to extract and learn the vocabulary of a new language. We tested Spanish- and Italian-speaking adults' ability to learn words from an artificial language with either non-native OV or native VO word order. The results show that learners used prosodic information to identify the most prominent words in short utterances when the artificial language was similar to the native language, with duration-based prominence in prosody and a VO word order. In contrast, when the artificial language had a non-native prominence marked by pitch alternations and an OV word order, prominent words were learned only after a three-day exposure to the relevant rhythmic structure. Thus, for adult L2 learners, only repeated exposure to the relevant prosody elicited learning new words from an unknown language with non-native prosodic marking, indicating that, with familiarity, prosodic cues can facilitate learning in L2.
雅克·梅勒 (Jacques Mehler) 和他的同事提出的一个重要观点是，从出生起就存在的感知调谐使婴儿和一般语言学习者能够从语音输入中提取规则。在这里，我们讨论语言学习者从语言的韵律规则中提取基本语序（VO 或 OV）结构的能力。这两者密切相关：在 VO 语言的语音短语中，最突出的词是最右边的词，而在 OV 语言中，最突出的词是最左边的词。在言语中，这种突出表现为延长持续时间，或提高音高，有时与强度变化相结合。在学习第一语言 (L1) 或第二语言 (L2) 时，接触相关的节奏结构会引发对句法结构的隐性学习，包括基本语序。然而，目前尚不清楚触发学习过程是否需要对相关节奏有一定程度的熟悉。此外，尚不清楚韵律信息是否可以帮助 L2 学习者提取和学习新语言的词汇。我们测试了西班牙语和意大利语成年人从具有非母语 OV 或母语 VO 语序的人工语言中学习单词的能力。结果表明，当人工语言与母语相似时，学习者会使用韵律信息来识别短语句中的最突出单词，并且在韵律上具有基于持续时间的突出性和 VO 语序。相比之下，当人工语言具有非母语的突出性，由音高交替标记且具有 OV 语序时，只有在对相关节奏结构进行三天的暴露后，突出的单词才能被学习。因此，对于成年 L2 学习者，只有重复接触相关韵律才能从具有非母语韵律标记的未知语言中学习新单词，这表明，随着熟悉程度的提高，韵律线索可以促进 L2 学习。
