CAREER: The Role of Prosody in Word Segmentation and Lexical Access

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。了解人类如何理解语音是一个未解决的和具有挑战性的问题，部分原因是语音信号的声学特性之间的多对多映射（即，频率、定时和幅度）和收听者所感知的词语。本研究的重点是语音音高，响度和语速（统称为韵律）的贡献，理解口语单词。以前，这些语音信号的韵律方面已被假定为在口语单词识别，分词和词汇访问中发挥次要作用。然而，最近的研究结果表明，语音韵律可以对单词的理解产生非常重要的影响。这项研究对人类健康，技术和科学有着重大的推动作用。例如，在影响言语和语言的许多障碍中，包括诵读困难、自闭症、口吃、帕金森病、失语症和构音障碍，对音高、响度和/或言语定时的感知或产生经常被高度破坏。拟议的研究可能会导致对这些疾病的潜在机制的新见解，这将为开发更好的治疗方法提供信息。此外，这项研究有可能导致改进的语音技术应用，从增强的计算机自动语音识别，以更自然的声音计算机生成的语音。这项工作为高中、本科和研究生阶段的学生提供了研究经验。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Understanding how humans comprehend speech is an unsolved and challenging problem, in part because of the many-to-many mapping between the acoustical properties of the speech signal (i.e., frequency, timing, and amplitude) and the words perceived by the listener. The focus of this research is on the contributions of voice pitch, loudness, and speech rate (collectively termed prosody) to understanding spoken words. Previously, these prosodic aspects of the speech signal have been assumed to play a minor role in spoken word recognition, word segmentation, and lexical access. However, recent results suggest that speech prosody can have very significant effects on how words are understood.This research holds potential for significant advancements in human health, technology, and science. For example, perception or production of voice pitch, loudness, and/or speech timing are often highly disrupted in many disorders affecting speech and language, including dyslexia, autism, stuttering, Parkinsons disease, aphasia, and dysarthria. The proposed research may lead to new insights regarding mechanisms underlying these disorders, which will inform the development of better treatments for those afflicted. In addition, the research has potential to lead to improved speech technology applications, from enhanced automatic speech recognition by computer, to more natural-sounding computer-generated speech. The work provides research experiences for students at the high school, undergraduate and graduate levels.