PRIMIR on Tone

Frontiers in Psychology

Suzanne Curtin¹ 

关键词: PRIMIR;    tone;    speech perception;    language acquisition;    word learning;    bilingualism;    infancy;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01007

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional Interactive Representations (PRIMIR) was first developed to address divergent findings in the literature surrounding early speech perception and word learning (Werker and Curtin, 2005; Curtin and Werker, 2007). Specifically, there was a controversy in the literature at the time indicating that while under some circumstances infants and toddlers are able to discriminate a mispronunciation of a known word, in other testing circumstances, they had difficulty using phonetic/phonological differences to guide word learning. PRIMIR was developed as a framework for understanding why infants attend to some kinds of information over others in different testing situations. Integral to PRIMIR are the representations and processing that simultaneously impact how the infant interprets the information in the signal. PRIMIR assumes infants have access to a rich signal containing multi-sensory information. It further assumes that infants have initial biases that work together with learning mechanisms (e.g., statistical, comparison/contrast) to help process, organize, and store the information gleaned from the signal. Information is stored within emergent interactive representational planes: general perceptual, word form, and phoneme, and is processed using three dynamic filters: initial biases (e.g., preferences for speech, native-language rhythm, and infant-directed speech), the developmental level of the infant, and the task that the child is facing (e.g., discriminating sounds, learning words). While the initial biases draw the infant's attention to the linguistic signal, the developmental level and the task will influence what information is attended to, stored, and used at any given time. That is, the states of the infant's various representations and the task itself will shift how the infant interprets the information. With this in mind, rather than clear-cut developmental boundaries of when an infant might show evidence of acquiring any particular linguistic ability, the process is more multiplexed, with the use of some types of information potentiated only once the relevant representations are in place. While the input that the infant has access to is rich, some aspects of the signal are inherently more salient than others, and some of those properties that are perhaps not as inherently salient can become enhanced through experience, development, and their contribution to category formation. In other words, some sound properties have raw acoustic salience, while others require converging sources of evidence (be it multi-sensory or contextual) to be processed, discriminated, or learned. Tone is a paradigmatic example of how acoustic salience (pitch), and the representational structures that are in place influence its processing.

【 授权许可】

CC BY