Infants are capable of exploiting many cues, including acoustic information such as word stress, to locate word boundaries in fluent speech. The research proposed in this application is designed to uncover the developmental course of attention to acoustic cues, and the learning mechanisms that allow infants to discover what the acoustic events in the speech they hear signify about word boundaries. We hypothesize that infants use statistical learning - the process of discovering regularities by tracking patterns of covariance in the input - to initially identify word boundaries in fluent speech, then detect the acoustic regularities of the word onsets and offsets in their early vocabulary. If so, infants should be able to detect the acoustic regularities that correspond to word boundaries in novel languages, so long as they are able to extract words from such a language. Further, they should be able to learn which acoustic events indicate word boundaries not just from perfect associations, but from covariances that occur only a majority of the time, which is the type of covariance usually present in natural languages. This research will provide a model for infant acquisition of multiple acoustic regularities associated with word boundaries.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Type
Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F31)
Project #
5F31DC005871-02
Application #
6646584
Study Section
Communication Disorders Review Committee (CDRC)
Program Officer
Sklare, Dan
Project Start
2002-09-11
Project End
2004-08-31
Budget Start
2003-09-11
Budget End
2004-08-31
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
2003
Total Cost
$27,916
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Wisconsin Madison
Department
Pediatrics
Type
Other Domestic Higher Education
DUNS #
161202122
City
Madison
State
WI
Country
United States
Zip Code
53715