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

职业：韵律在分词和词汇访问中的作用

• 批准号: 0847653
• 负责人: Laura Dilley
• 金额: $ 46.5万
• 依托单位: Michigan State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-08-15 至 2014-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0847653&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Role; Prosody; Word; Segmentation

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.

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(Public Law 111-5)资助的。人类如何理解言语是一个悬而未决的具有挑战性的问题，部分原因是语音信号的声学特性(即频率、时序和幅度)与听者所感知的词语之间存在多对多的映射。这项研究的重点是音调、音量和语速(统称为韵律)对理解口语单词的贡献。以前，语音信号的这些韵律方面被认为在口语单词识别、单词分割和词汇获取中扮演次要角色。然而，最近的研究结果表明，语音韵律可以对如何理解单词产生非常显著的影响。这项研究有可能在人类健康、技术和科学方面取得重大进展。例如，在许多影响语言和语言的障碍中，包括阅读困难、自闭症、口吃、帕金森氏病、失语症和构音障碍，对音调、响度和/或语音计时的感知或产生经常高度中断。这项拟议的研究可能会导致对这些疾病潜在机制的新见解，这将为开发更好的治疗这些疾病的方法提供信息。此外，这项研究有可能改进语音技术的应用，从计算机增强的自动语音识别，到听起来更自然的计算机生成语音。这项工作为高中、本科生和研究生提供了研究经验。