Effects of Phonetic and Audiovisual Perception on Learning Phonetically-similar Words in Mandarin-learning Infants
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Hu, You-Hsin
Abstract
English-learning infants were capable of learning phonetically dissimilar words at 14 months of age. Till 17 months of age, they were able to learn phonetically similar words. Lexical tones manifest lexical meanings of syllables in Mandarin Chinese. Thus, exploring the developmental trends of learning words of lexical-tone minimal pairs is essential to further understanding the language development process in Mandarin learning infants. Some studies showed that audiovisual perception emerged as early as 2 months of age. This perceptual ability also facilitated infants to easily discriminate speech sounds. However, no studies examined the development trend of the effect of audiovisual perception on word learning. The goal of this study was to figure out the effects of phonetic perception and audiovisual perception on learning new words. There were two experiments in our study. The first experiment examined the developmental trend of using the ability of perceiving lexical tones to learn new words. Fifty-six infants, aged 13-(n=13), 15-(n=15), 17-(n=13) and 20-months(n=15), were tested with two pairs switch task when learning lexical tone contrasts words, tone 1 vs. tone 4. The results showed that only 20-month-old infants easily using perceptual ability of lexical tones in word learning. The second experiment was also test infants with two pairs switch task. The ages of infants were 14(n=24), 17(n=24) and 20 months (n=24). This experiment tried to explore whether infants were able to learn phontically-similar words and present the audiovisual perception simultaneously. In other words, it was anticipated that infants did not only integrate audio/ba/ and visual/ga/ stimuli and form the audiovisual perception /da/ (i.e., McGurk effect), but also map phonetically-similar words with referents. The result showed that neither 14-month-old infants nor 20-month-old infants learned words during audiovisual-perception processing. However, infants either showed audiovisual perception or learned new words, this pattern was clearer in 14–month-old infants. In addition, both of the experiments didn’t find any significant correlations between infants’ word learning performance and language abilities. In conclusion, infants are able to learn phonetic similar word after 18 months of age, but they were difficult to perform the ability of audiovisual intermodal perception and learning phonetically-similar words at the same time.
Subjects
語音知覺
視聽整合
聲調
子音
詞彙學習
雙對轉換作業
語言發展
Type
thesis
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