Ohde R N, Haley K L, McMahon C W
Division of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee 37232, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 1996 Dec;100(6):3813-24. doi: 10.1121/1.417338.
The purpose of this study was to assess the perceptual role of brief synthetic consonant-vowel syllables as cues for vowel perception in children and adults. Nine types of consonant-vowel syllables comprised of the stops [b d g] followed by the vowels [i a u] were synthesized. Stimuli were generated with durations of 10, 30, or 46 ms, and with or without formant transition motion. Eight children at each of five age levels (5, 6, 7, 9, and 11 years) and a control group of eight adults were trained to identify each vowel in a three-alternative forced-choice (3AFC) paradigm. The results showed that children and adults extracted vowel information at a generally high level from stimuli as brief as 10 ms. For many stimuli, there was little or no difference between the performance of children and adults. However, developmental effects were observed. First, the accuracy of vowel perception was more influenced by the consonant context for children than for adults. Whereas perception was similar across age levels for stimuli in the alveolar context, the youngest children perceived vowels in the labial and velar contexts at significantly lower levels than adults. Second, children were more affected by variations in stimulus duration than were adults. This finding was particularly prominent for the syllable [ga], where the dependency on duration decreased with age in a nearly linear fashion. These findings are discussed in relation to current hypotheses of vowel perception in adults, and hypotheses of speech perception development.
本研究的目的是评估简短的合成辅音-元音音节作为儿童和成人元音感知线索的感知作用。合成了九种由塞音[b d g]后跟元音[i a u]组成的辅音-元音音节。生成的刺激时长为10、30或46毫秒，且有或没有共振峰过渡运动。五个年龄组（5、6、7、9和11岁）各有八名儿童以及一个由八名成年人组成的对照组，在三选一强制选择（3AFC）范式下接受训练以识别每个元音。结果表明，儿童和成人能从短至10毫秒的刺激中提取出总体水平较高的元音信息。对于许多刺激而言，儿童和成人的表现差异很小或没有差异。然而，观察到了发展效应。首先，与成人相比，辅音语境对儿童元音感知准确性的影响更大。虽然在齿龈语境中的刺激在各年龄组的感知相似，但最年幼的儿童在唇音和软腭语境中对元音的感知水平明显低于成人。其次，与成人相比，儿童受刺激时长变化的影响更大。这一发现对于音节[ga]尤为突出，在该音节中，对时长的依赖性几乎呈线性随年龄降低。结合当前关于成人元音感知的假说以及语音感知发展的假说对这些发现进行了讨论。
