Nittrouer S
Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE, USA.
J Speech Hear Res. 1996 Apr;39(2):278-97. doi: 10.1044/jshr.3902.278.
Studies of children's speech perception have shown that young children process speech signals differently than adults. Specifically, the relative contributions made by various acoustic parameters to some linguistic decisions seem to differ for children and adults. Such findings have led to the hypothesis that there is a developmental shift in the perceptual weighting of acoustic parameters that results from experience with a native language (i.e., the Developmental Weighting Shift). This developmental shift eventually leads the child to adopt the optimal perceptual weighting strategy for the native language being learned (i.e., one that allows the listener to make accurate decisions about the phonemic structure or his or her native language). Although this proposal has intuitive appeal, there is at least one serious challenge that can be leveled against it: Perhaps age-related differences in speech perception can appropriately be explained by age-related differences in basic auditory-processing abilities. That is, perhaps children are not as sensitive as adults to subtle differences in acoustic structure and so make linguistic decisions based on the acoustic information that is most perceptually salient. The present study tested this hypothesis for the acoustic cues relevant to fricative identity in fricative-vowel syllables. Results indicated that 3-year-olds were not as sensitive to changes in these acoustic cues as adults are, but that these age-related differences in auditory sensitivity could not entirely account for age-related differences in perceptual weighting strategies.
对儿童言语感知的研究表明，幼儿处理言语信号的方式与成人不同。具体而言，各种声学参数对某些语言决策的相对贡献在儿童和成人中似乎有所不同。这些发现引发了一种假设，即由于对母语的体验，声学参数的感知权重存在发育转变（即发育权重转变）。这种发育转变最终使儿童采用所学母语的最佳感知权重策略（即一种能让听者对其母语的音位结构做出准确决策的策略）。尽管这一观点具有直观的吸引力，但至少有一个严峻的挑战可以针对它提出：也许言语感知中与年龄相关的差异可以通过基本听觉处理能力中与年龄相关的差异得到恰当解释。也就是说，也许儿童对声学结构的细微差异不像成人那么敏感，因此基于最明显的声学信息做出语言决策。本研究针对与塞擦音-元音音节中与塞擦音识别相关的声学线索检验了这一假设。结果表明，3岁儿童对这些声学线索变化的敏感度不如成人，但听觉敏感度上这些与年龄相关的差异并不能完全解释感知权重策略上与年龄相关的差异。
