Learning to Accommodate Variation in Speech Input

为了成为流利的母语者和听众，孩子们最终必须感知并说出与当地方言一致的语言。例如，在加拿大卡尔加里说的英语听起来与在宾夕法尼亚州匹兹堡说的英语略有不同。这两种英语环境的变化是模式化的，儿童在学习语言时必须掌握这些规律。似乎与此不一致的是，孩子们还必须保持一定的灵活性，将语音映射到意义上。例如，婴儿有时会遇到说话人，他们的语言与他们所在社区的方言规范大相径庭，就像来自意大利的非母语人士用英语说话一样。因此，在学习当地方言的规范模式的同时，儿童还必须保持足够的认知灵活性，以适应不符合这些规范的说话者。在语言学习中，婴幼儿是如何完成这些看似相互竞争的任务的？回答这个问题将揭示儿童在多个时间尺度上学习的一般特征：从对短暂语音的自发解释，到对偏离预期的短期适应，再到对当地方言规律的长期学习。本研究绘制了婴儿在其母语环境中与成人进行不同社会互动时所暴露的声学变异性范围。它将创建一个详细的声学语音生产语料库，以了解婴儿语言学习者面临的挑战。本研究还将研究婴幼儿语言感知如何受到方言规律的影响，揭示对方言规范的长期敏感和对方言规范偏离的短期适应机制。它还将研究幼儿不断增长的词汇量如何影响对口语变化的适应。该研究采用了一种创新的跨学科方法来解决这些问题。了解英语语音结构知识的早期发展及其与词汇发展的相互作用将有助于我们理解典型的语言发展。这也将进一步加深我们对多语言学习情境下口音发展和早期沟通缺陷的理解。该项目的一个重要成果将是语音语料库的传播，为其他研究人员研究英语方言提供丰富的语音声学样本。

To become fluent native speakers and listeners, children ultimately must perceive and produce speech that is consistent with the local dialect. For example, English spoken in Calgary, Canada sounds slightly different than English spoken in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The variation in these two English environments is patterned and, in learning language, children must acquire these regularities. Seemingly at odds with this, children must also maintain some flexibility in mapping speech sounds to meaning. For example, infants sometimes encounter talkers whose speech deviates quite drastically from their community's dialectal norms, as when addressed in English by a non-native speaker from Italy. Thus, while learning the normative patterns of their local dialect, children also must maintain enough cognitive flexibility to accommodate talkers who do not fall within these norms. How do infants and toddlers accomplish these seemingly competing tasks in language learning? Answering this question will reveal general characteristics of children's learning at multiple time scales: from spontaneous interpretation of fleeting speech sounds, to short-term adaptation to deviations from expectation, to longer-term learning of the regularities of the local dialect. This research maps the range of acoustic variability to which infants are exposed in their native speech environment in different social interactions with adults. It will create a detailed acoustic speech production corpus with which to understand the challenges confronting infant language learners. The research will also study how infants' and toddlers' speech perception is shaped by regularities of the local dialect, revealing the mechanisms of long-term sensitivity to dialect norms and short-term adaptation to deviations from dialect norms. It will also investigate how toddlers' growing vocabularies influence adaptation to variability in spoken language.The research takes an innovative cross-disciplinary approach to these questions. Understanding early development of the knowledge of the sound structure of English and its interaction with developing vocabularies will contribute to our understanding of typical language development. It will also further our understanding of accent development in multilingual learning situations and early communicative deficits. An important outcome of the project will be the dissemination of a speech corpus, providing a rich acoustic sample of speech for other researchers to use in studying English dialects.