Newman R S, Jusczyk P W
Department of Psychology, Park Hall, SUNY at Buffalo 14260, USA. rochelle%
Percept Psychophys. 1996 Nov;58(8):1145-56. doi: 10.3758/bf03207548.
Most speech research with infants occurs in quiet laboratory rooms with no outside distractions. However, in the real world, speech directed to infants often occurs in the presence of other competing acoustic signals. To learn language, infants need to attend to their caregiver's speech even under less than ideal listening conditions. We examined 7.5-month-old infants' abilities to selectively attend to a female talker's voice when a male voice was talking simultaneously. In three experiments, infants heard a target voice repeating isolated words while a distractor voice spoke fluently at one of three different intensities. Subsequently, infants heard passages produced by the target voice containing either the familiar words or novel words. Infants listened longer to the familiar words when the target voice was 10 dB or 5 dB more intense than the distractor, but not when the two voices were equally intense. In a fourth experiment, the assignment of words and passages to the familiarization and testing phases was reversed so that the passages and distractors were presented simultaneously during familiarization, and the infants were tested on the familiar and unfamiliar isolated words. During familiarization, the passages were 10 dB more intense than the distractors. The results suggest that this may be at the limits of what infants at this age can do in separating two different streams of speech. In conclusion, infants have some capacity to extract information from speech even in the face of a competing acoustic voice.
大多数针对婴儿的语音研究都是在安静的实验室房间里进行的，没有外界干扰。然而，在现实世界中，对着婴儿说的话往往是在存在其他竞争性声学信号的情况下发生的。为了学习语言，即使在不太理想的听力条件下，婴儿也需要专注于照顾者的语音。我们研究了7.5个月大的婴儿在男性声音同时说话时，选择性地专注于女性说话者声音的能力。在三个实验中，婴儿听到一个目标声音重复孤立的单词，而一个干扰声音以三种不同强度之一流利地说话。随后，婴儿听到由目标声音产生的包含熟悉单词或新单词的段落。当目标声音比干扰声音高10分贝或5分贝时，婴儿对熟悉单词的聆听时间更长，但当两个声音强度相同时则不然。在第四个实验中，单词和段落分配到熟悉阶段和测试阶段的顺序被颠倒，这样在熟悉阶段段落和干扰声音同时呈现，并且对婴儿进行熟悉和不熟悉的孤立单词测试。在熟悉阶段，段落比干扰声音高10分贝。结果表明，这可能处于这个年龄段婴儿在分离两种不同语音流方面能力的极限。总之，即使面对竞争性声学声音，婴儿也有一定能力从语音中提取信息。
