摘要
咿呀学语阶段是音系发展的关键过渡期,儿童由此逐渐对目标语言的音系产生敏感性,感知和产出表现出明显的母语偏向。通过观察咿呀学语,可以了解儿童如何由前语言阶段过渡到首词阶段。这对于解答语言获得领域的核心问题具有重要启示,也可为检验理论语言学假设提供证据。本文总结儿童咿呀学语期音系研究的前沿进展,探讨儿童咿呀学语期音系研究中的四个争议问题:咿呀学语向母语语音模式转变的机制、咿呀学语与语言发展的关系、咿呀学语与音位构建的关系、咿呀学语期音系发展的理论模型。最后,文章指出汉语儿童咿呀学语期音系发展研究未来可开展的工作。
Babbling is a critical transition period for phonological development during which infants begin to show sensitivity to and preference for the phonology of native language in both perception and production.An investigation of babbling is valuable in terms of understanding the child's transition from pre-language to the first word period,providing insight for answering the core questions in the field of language acquisition and external empirical evidence for testing theoretical linguistic hypotheses.This paper summarizes the recent development in the phonological studies of babbling and reviews the four major controversial issues with regard to the phonological development in the babbling stage.First,debate and discussion continue as to the mechanism for the shift from babbling to the phonological pattern of native language.It is proposed that the implicit distributional or statistical learning could serve to account for infants'attunement to the phonology of the ambient adult language.However,it is noted that those studies supporting statistical learning mechanism often use acoustic contrast pairs as test stimuli,which are different from everyday natural input.Children's participation in social exchanges also influence the phonological development and the neural mechanism underlying statistical learning still remains unclear.Second,how is babbling related to speech?Jakobson's proposal of discontinuity between babbling and speech has been challenged by recent empirical findings.In general,continuity between the babbling patterns and early words has been well established.However,certain new phonetic trends can also be found in early words.There is still relatively limited understanding of the transition from babbling to speech.Third,how is babbling related to the emergence of phonemic categories?Based on infant's preference for the phonemes in their native languages,some scholars argue that infants actually go through a stage of phoneme recognition prior to accessing lexical representation.While others maintain that the phonological processing in the babbling stage is not at the phonemic level,instead,the semantic-based top-down processing is found to be essential in the formation of phonemic category.Fourth,still controversial are questions of whether the phonological capacities are innate or emergent during phonological development.The formalists argue that infants share with adults the same innate foreknowledge of linguistic structure in the form of Universal Grammar.This is questioned by cognitive linguists and others adopting a functionalist or usage-based stance,who argue that phonology is rooted in the speech-motor and perceptual systems,with no appeal to any specifically linguistic foreknowledge.This paper also points out the directions for further research in the babbling of Chinese-learning infants:(1)Technical advances have made new methods available for the study of infants'phonological development.In addition to the head turn and preferential looking paradigms,new technical methods,such as eye-tracking,event related potentials(ERPs),and magnetoencephalography(MEG),could be applied in the experimental study of the babbling of Chinese-learning infants.(2)Social interaction plays an important role in language development.It is evident that caretaker-infant interaction constitutes one of the foundations for phonological development,making it necessary to carry out cross-modal experimental studies of the caretaker-infant relationship and the child's gaze and gestures.(3)Much of the literature on the babbling of Chinese-learning infants focuses on children learning Mandarin and studies of the phonological development of those growing up in dialect-speaking areas have been less available.It is pertinent to ask whether there are cross-dialect differences and how these differences should be accounted for.(4)With the development of technology for phonetic transcription and phonological analysis,there is a global trend to develop infant speech database.This highlights that more efforts should be devoted to construct speech corpus of Chinese-learning infants.The use of databases will make it easier to conduct well-grounded studies of speech production.(5)Previous research has demonstrated that the prosodic features of infant vocalizations display influence from the ambient adult language.It is therefore of interest to investigate whether it is possible to identify the precursors to tones from the prosodic features of Chinese-learning infants'babbling,which may shed new light on the studies of tone acquisition.
作者
钱有用
尹玉霞
QIAN Youyong;YIN Yuxia
出处
《中国语音学报》
2024年第1期66-77,共12页
Chinese Journal of Phonetics
基金
天津市教委科研计划(人文社科)项目“汉语重叠音系”(项目编号:2020SK031)的阶段性成果
关键词
语言获得
咿呀学语
音系
感知
产出
Language acquisition
Babbling
Phonology
Perception
Production
作者简介
钱有用,博士,中国社会科学院语言研究所副研究员,主要研究领域为音系理论、音系获得、音系句法界面。Email:qianyy@cass.org.cn;通讯作者:尹玉霞,博士,天津师范大学外国语学院副教授,主要研究领域为音系学、儿童音系发展。Email:wsyyx2008@126.com
