Collaborative Research: The interplay of production and perception in sound changes affecting US English

你说的方言决定了你如何听到你周围的演讲吗？在国家科学基金会的支持下，Tyler Kendall博士和Valerie Fridland博士将进行为期24个月的语言研究，调查元音感知如何受到方言经验的影响。该项目利用基于网络的感知实验从美国各地获得参与，并记录这些参与对象的子集的语音，该项目将调查元音类别(例如，“ee”和“ih”)的感知和产生之间存在什么联系，以及这些类别是如何通过社区和个人层面的差异来调节的。特别是，这项研究将考察影响美国英语三种主要方言(北部、南部和西部)的独特的地区性元音变化是否除了语音产生外，还有助于语音处理的更大多样性，以及个人表现出的元音变化本身是否影响他们相对于社区规范的语音处理。为了更好地了解社会影响对言语知觉的影响，本研究将调查听者对元音的分类是否也受到他们对习得的说话人之间的社会差异的期望的影响，如地区从属关系或性别。越来越多的证据表明，社会派生的语言变异不仅提供了社会认同的线索，而且实际上在言语信号本身的实际处理和解码中发挥着关键作用。这一领域的研究应被证明具有应用效益，例如为非母语/方言人口提供教育方法，并促进语音识别技术的发展。此外，对受不同方言经验影响的说话人的产出性和知觉范围的比较研究将为言语和听觉科学以及社会语言学研究提供信息，有助于形成关于语音处理和声音变化本质的基本理论。

Does the dialect you speak determine how you hear the speech around you? With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Tyler Kendall and Dr. Valerie Fridland will conduct twenty-four months of linguistic research investigating how vowel perception is affected by dialect experience. Utilizing web-based perception experiments to gain participation from across the U.S., and recording speech from a subset of these participating subjects, the project will investigate what links exist between the perception and production of vowel categories (e.g., "ee" and "ih") and how these categories are mediated by variation at the level of the community and the individual. In particular, the research will examine whether distinctive regional vowel changes that affect three main dialects of American English (Northern, Southern and Western) are contributing to greater diversity in speech processing, in addition to speech production, and whether the degree to which individuals show such vowel changes themselves affects their speech processing in relation to their community norms. To gain a better understanding of the impact of social influences on speech perception, this research will investigate whether listeners' categorization of vowels is also affected by their expectations regarding learned social distinctions among speakers, such as regional affiliation or gender.Increasing evidence suggests that socially derived linguistic variation provides more than simply clues to social identity, and, in fact, plays a pivotal role in the actual processing and decoding of the speech signal itself. Research in this area should prove to have applied benefits such as informing educational approaches to non-native language/dialect populations and also to the development of voice recognition technologies. Further, comparative examination of the productive and perceptual range of speakers affected by different dialect experiences will inform both speech and hearing science and sociolinguistic research, contributing to basic theories about the nature of speech processing and of sound change.