ABSTRACT

Previous work suggests that adolescents are still refining acoustic-phonetic cue use in clear-speech perception. This study shows adolescents’ immature perception of reduced speech, in which speech sounds are naturally deleted and merged within and across words. German adults and 16-year-olds listened to either German reduced or unreduced (few or full cues) part- and full phrases (without and with context) in a phrase-intelligibility task. As expected, adolescents had lower scores when adequate perception required flexible acoustic-phonetic cue use most, i.e., when hearing reduced speech without context. Participants also listened to reduced and unreduced words and pseudowords (no context) in a lexical decision task. Here, 16-year-olds had poorer and slower responses than adults overall and particularly when hearing pseudowords. Explanations for the age effects are discussed. We conclude that experience continues to refine linguistic representations, at least until adulthood.

摘要

先前的工作表明，青少年仍在改善语音提示在清晰语音感知中的使用。这项研究表明，青少年对语音还原的不成熟感觉是，语音自然被删除并在单词内和单词间合并。在短语可理解性任务中，德国成年人和16岁的孩子听了德语的减少或未减少（很少或完全提示）部分和完整短语（无上下文）。不出所料，当足够的知觉需要灵活使用语音提示时，即在没有语境的情况下听到减少的语音时，青少年的分数较低。在词汇决策任务中，参与者还听取了减少和未减少的单词和伪单词（无上下文）。在这里，16岁儿童的反应总体上比成年人差，且较慢，尤其是在听到假单词时。讨论了年龄效应的解释。我们得出结论，至少在成年之前，经验一直在不断完善语言表述。