统计学习和感觉-运动联结: 婴儿语音感知的双重路径
Statistical Learning and Sensorimotor Coupling: Dual Pathways Underlying Infant Speech Perception
摘要
关于语音感知发展, 统计学习与感觉-运动联结是两种重要理论路径, 前者强调环境分布信息, 后者突出言语运动调节。以汉语环境中的80名8月龄婴儿为被试, 通过交替/相同注视范式, 分别操纵分布信息(单峰/双峰)与舌尖运动反馈(抑制/允许), 考察其对印地语辅音对比/ɖ/-/d̪/及声学匹配非语音刺激的区分表现的影响。结果显示, 双峰分布输入后婴儿表现出对目标辅音对比的区分敏感性, 而单峰条件下未观察到稳定区分; 允许运动组在辅音条件下呈现交替优势, 而运动抑制组未呈现相应模式。总体上, 非语音刺激在各实验条件下均未诱发稳定区分行为。研究提示, 短时输入分布能够调节婴儿的语音区分表现；感觉-运动状态也可能影响婴儿对辅音差异的感知。总体而言, 两项实验的结果在一定程度上均呈现出向语音输入倾斜的趋势。两条路径或存在功能差异: 感觉-运动状态可能在较少依赖当前实验输入的情况下发挥即时调节作用; 统计学习过程则可能通过输入分布信息影响语音感知表征的短时调整, 并可能在更长时间尺度的语音感知调谐中发挥作用。
Abstract
During the first year of life, infants speech perception undergoes a remarkable reorganization: their attention shifts from discriminating broad, non-native phonetic contrasts to focusing strictly on distinctions within their native language. How do infants develop this specialized sensitivity? The acquisition of speech perception is theorized to rely on two complementary mechanisms: statistical learning and sensorimotor coupling. Statistical learning emphasizes infants sensitivity to the distributional regularities of speech input, whereas sensorimotor coupling highlights the modulatory role of articulatory motor feedback. The present study examined the contributions of these two mechanisms during the sensitive period to determine whether speech perception arises from a single mechanism or from the interaction of multiple mechanisms.The present study examined the contributions and boundaries of statistical learning and sensorimotor coupling in 80 eight-month-old Mandarin-learning infants using an alternating/non-alternating visual fixation paradigm across two experiments. Experiment 1 manipulated the distributional properties of the familiarization input to evaluate the statistical learning. Infants were exposed to either a unimodal or bimodal frequency distribution of speech tokens and subsequently tested for their ability to discriminate the Hindi dental-retroflex contrast (//-/d/). Experiment 2 isolated the causal role of sensorimotor coupling by using a teething toy that either restricted or did not restrict tongue-tip movement, following the paradigm of Bruderer et al. (2015). No additional auditory familiarization was provided, allowing us to assess the causal role of motor feedback in speech perception. Both experiments utilized speech and non-speech stimuli. The speech stimuli comprised the Hindi dental-retroflex contrast (//-/d/), while the non-speech control stimuli consisted of acoustically matched synthesized tones based on piano timbre, designed to parallel the temporal and spectral properties of the speech stimuli.Across all conditions, infants looking times decreased progressively with repeated stimulus presentations, confirming a habituation effect. (1) After exposure to the bimodal distribution, infants exhibited significantly longer looking times to alternating speech streams than to non-alternating speech streams, indicating successful speech discrimination. Conversely, those in the unimodal condition, showed no significant differences between alternating and non-alternating speech streams, suggesting the lack of effective speech discrimination. When the stimuli were non-speech sounds, neither the bimodal nor the unimodal distribution elicited discrimination behaviour. (2) The results of Experiment 2 revealed that under the unrestricted tongue-tip movement condition, infants demonstrated significantly longer looking times to alternating speech streams than to non-alternating ones, indicating speech discrimination. In contrast, restricting tongue-tip movement eliminated the discrimination effect. For non-speech stimuli, neither motor condition elicited discrimination behaviour.Statistical learning and sensorimotor coupling jointly support early speech perception, revealing a multimechanistic architecture in infant language acquisition. Under the current experimental conditions, the distributional learning effect was primarily observed for speech stimuli, whereas the sensorimotor manipulation showed a similar but less conclusive trend. This relative advantage for speech stimuli may reflect infants selective attentional orientation towards speech and the preferential activation of sensorimotor couplings by speech signals, though this interpretation remains preliminary and requires validation from future larger-sample studies. Moreover, the role of environmental input in speech acquisition appears to be multilevel: while the sensorimotor mechanism can generate initial discrimination sensitivity in the absence of specific speech experience, the statistical learning mechanism refines and stabilizes this sensitivity through continuous exposure to the ambient language environment.关键词
语音感知/统计学习/感觉-运动联结/婴儿Key words
speech perception/statistical learning/sensorimotor coupling/infants引用本文复制引用
.统计学习和感觉-运动联结: 婴儿语音感知的双重路径[EB/OL].(2026-08-06)[2026-08-19].https://chinaxiv.org/abs/202608.00003.学科分类
语言学/汉语
