Understanding the perception and recognition of spoken words: Effects of phonetics, phonological variation, and speech mode

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Everyday, people face variation in language. Readers see words printed in different fonts and typefaces, typically static on a page. Listeners hear a speech signal that is riddled with variation. Words are pronounced at different speeds, with different emotions, by different speakers with various accents in different situations, streaming by listeners at a rate of about 5 to 7 syllables per second. No two utterances of a single word are identical, yet this variation typically goes unnoticed. Despite this variation, listeners quickly and adeptly understand these different pronunciations as one word and not another; this is remarkable, considering that many words sound the same. An issue central to linguistic theory is how listeners are able to take this variable speech string and understand it. Explanations of how listeners accomplish this task incorporate purely linguistic solutions to the problem. Dr. Sumner's research program takes a new approach, grounded by the real-world information conveyed by acoustic-phonetic values. From any window of speech, listeners encounter cues about sound patterns, but they also encounter cues about the social characteristics of a particular speech situation. The impetus behind this work is that advancement in understanding the perception and recognition of spoken words will come from examining the ways in which listeners use these ever-present cues together. Dr. Sumner will examine this question by examining the ways in which listeners respond to words that vary along different linguistic and social dimensions. She will use experimental methods that inform us about how a word pronunciation improves recognition to related words in the mental lexicon, and about how listeners categorize different sounds depending on the linguistic and social context in which they are uttered.This work investigates the claims that listeners rely on socially-informative acoustic values of nearby sounds and words when understanding speech, and that linguistic information is stored with social representations that influence speech perception at a level much lower than once thought. This work adds a new link between linguistic and social experience to theories of speech perception and should prompt the field to reconsider the role of acoustic patterns and their place in theory more broadly. Integrating linguistic and social information, this research may provide a path to improve interactive spoken language technologies.