Mandel D R, Jusczyk P W, Nelson D G
Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Buffalo, 14260.
Cognition. 1994 Nov;53(2):155-80. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(94)90069-8.
Theories that propose a mapping between prosodic and syntactic structures require that prosodic units in fluent speech be perceptually salient for infants. Although previous studies have demonstrated that infants are sensitive to prosodic markers of syntactic units, they do not show that prosodic information really has an impact on how infants encode the speech they hear. Two experiments were conducted to examine whether infants as young as 2 months old might actually use the prosody afforded by sentences to organize and remember spoken information. The results suggest that infants better remember the phonetic properties of (1) words that are prosodically linked together within a single clause as opposed to individual items in a list (Experiment 1); and (2) words that are prosodically linked within a single clausal unit as opposed to spanning two contiguous fragments (Experiment 2). Taken together, the evidence from both experiments suggests that the prosodic organization of speech into clausal units enhances infants' memory for spoken information. These findings are discussed with regard to their implications for theories of language acquisition.
提出韵律结构与句法结构之间存在映射关系的理论认为，流畅言语中的韵律单元对于婴儿而言在感知上应是显著的。尽管先前的研究表明婴儿对句法单元的韵律标记很敏感，但这些研究并未表明韵律信息真的会对婴儿编码所听到的言语产生影响。我们进行了两项实验，以检验两个月大的婴儿是否真的会利用句子所提供的韵律来组织和记忆言语信息。结果表明，婴儿能更好地记住以下两类词的语音属性：（1）在单个从句中通过韵律联系在一起的词，而非列表中的单个项目（实验1）；（2）在单个从句单元内通过韵律联系在一起的词，而非跨越两个相邻片段的词（实验2）。综合来看，两项实验的证据均表明，将言语按从句单元进行韵律组织能够增强婴儿对言语信息的记忆。我们将结合这些发现对语言习得理论的意义进行讨论。
