Influences of high-level knowledge and low-level perception in accented-speech processing across development

我们生活在一个日益相互联系的世界里，因此，我们经常与听起来与我们不同的演讲者互动--他们有不同的口音。如果两个说同一种语言的人在不同的地方长大(加利福尼亚州和新西兰)，或者如果两个人的母语不同(美国英语和墨西哥西班牙语)，可能会导致口音差异。因为不同的口音使用不同的发音集合来产生相同的语言，所以可能会导致混淆。例如，如果一位西班牙口音的人报告说看到外面有一只“绵羊”，他们指的是披着羊毛的哺乳动物还是一艘大型远洋轮船？这项建议考察了两个可能对幼儿和成年人的口音理解产生积极影响的因素。其中一个因素是知觉学习，储存了带有西班牙口音的单词发音的新的心理表征。例如，孩子们可能会在潜意识中学到，英语“ih”元音的西班牙口音版本在听觉上与英语“ee”元音非常相似。第二个因素是语言环境，比如在一个语义上看似合理的句子中听到一个带重音的单词，比如“我们在一艘大船里横渡了大洋。”该项目的潜在积极影响既有科学的，也有社会的。从科学上讲，该项目将增加儿童和成年人对知觉范畴学习的理解。它将阐明知觉学习和句子上下文等高级知识如何共同影响重音语音理解，这不仅可以改善人类的感知，还将为计算机识别语音的方式提出潜在的改进建议。该项目还将生成一组高概率和低概率句子，以研究儿童实验(SAUE)中的口音理解。这套句子将公开供其他科学家使用，加快了语音理解实验的步伐，这些领域包括口音感知、嘈杂环境中的语音处理以及植入人工耳蜗的语音感知(人工听力设备)。西班牙语-英语双语研究人员是一群在STEM领域往往代表性不足的群体，他们将因其语言专业知识而被招募，并将在他们协助开展研究时得到指导，从而增加整体的科学参与。从社会角度讲，该项目将建议听众如何最好地提高他们的口音理解能力，促进学校、工作场所和媒体的交流。

We live in an increasingly interconnected world, and as a result, we often interact with speakers who sound different from us--they have different accents. Accent differences can result if two speakers of the same language grew up in different places (California vs. New Zealand), or if two speakers have different native languages (US English vs. Mexican Spanish). Because different accents use different sets of sounds to produce the same language, confusion can result. For instance, if a Spanish-accented speaker reports seeing a "sheep" outside, do they mean a wool-covered mammal or a large ocean-going vessel? This proposal examines two factors that may positively affect accented-speech comprehension in young children and in adults. One factor is perceptual learning, storing new mental representations of how Spanish-accented words sound. For instance, children may learn, at a subconscious level, that Spanish-accented versions of the English "ih" vowel are very acoustically similar to the English "ee" vowel. A second factor is language context, such as hearing an accented word in a semantically-plausible sentence like "We sailed across the ocean in a large _." The potential positive impacts of this project are both scientific and social. Scientifically, the project will increase understanding of perceptual-category learning in children and adults. It will clarify how perceptual learning and high-level knowledge like sentence context jointly influence accented-speech comprehension, which can improve not only human perception, but will suggest potential improvements to how computers recognize speech. The project will also generate a set of high- and low-probability Sentences to study Accent Understanding in Child Experiments (SAUCE). This sentence set will be made publicly available for other scientists to use, accelerating the pace of experimentation in speech comprehension in areas as diverse as accent perception, speech processing in noisy environments, and speech perception with cochlear implants (artificial hearing devices). Spanish-English bilingual researchers, a group who tend to be underrepresented in STEM fields, will be recruited for their language expertise, and will be mentored as they assist in conducting the research, increasing overall scientific participation. Socially speaking, the project will suggest how listeners can best improve their accent comprehension, facilitating communication in schools, workplaces, and the media.