Doctoral Dissertation Research: When is Phonetic Variation Helpful for Word Learning?

当我们听别人用我们的语言说句子时，每个单词都像人群中熟悉的面孔一样清晰可辨。 但事实上，每次我们听到一个特定的单词，它在听觉上都与我们上次听到的不同。 不同的说话者、不同的语速和不同的情绪状态都会影响一个词的特定声学形式。 有经验的语言使用者可以毫不费力地克服单词声学表现的这种可变性，但仍在学习语言的人-幼儿和第二语言学习者-却很难做到。 因此，从高度可变的声学信号中唯一地识别特定单词是必须通过所学习的每种语言的经验来掌握的技能。 这项研究的主要目标是探索一个可能有助于这种掌握的因素。 第二个问题是如何在头脑中表示单词，以便从声学信号中快速识别并快速产生。 了解多个说话者的输入何时有助于学习新单词将解决人们如何学习感知和产生单词的更广泛问题，这是学习第一或第二语言的关键任务。此外，言语感知和产生的关系一直是语音学和语言发展中的一个长期问题。人们通常认为，关于如何感知一个词的知识会影响关于如何产生这个词的知识。然而，关于是否存在一个单一的表征用于感知一个词和产生一个词，或者是否存在两个不同但相关的表征，存在很大的分歧。如果在多个说话者的益处方面，感知和产出之间存在差异，我们将有证据表明感知和产出的不同表征，至少在新学习一个单词时是这样。对多个说话者的好处的更细致的理解可能会为第二语言学习方法提供信息。更广泛地说，它也可能揭示语言在人类头脑中的表现方式。

When we listen to someone speaking sentences in our language, each word seems as clearly identifiable as a familiar face in a crowd. But in fact, each time we hear a particular word spoken, it is acoustically different from the last time we heard it spoken. Different talkers, different rates of speech, and different emotional states all affect the specific acoustic form that a word takes. Experienced language users have no trouble overcoming this variability in the acoustic manifestation of words, but people who are still learning the language - young children and second language learners - struggle. Thus, uniquely identifying particular words from a highly variable acoustic signal is a skill that must be mastered through experience for each language learned. The main goal of this research is to explore one factor that might contribute to that mastery. A secondary question is how words are represented in the mind so as to allow both rapid identification from the acoustic signal and rapid production. Understanding when input from multiple talkers is helpful for learning new words will address the broader question of how people learn to perceive and produce words, a crucial task in learning a first or second language. Additionally, the way that speech perception and production are related has been a long-standing issue in phonetics as well as in language development. There is usually agreement that the knowledge about how to perceive a word influences knowledge about how to produce that word. However, there is much disagreement as to whether there is a single representation that is used for both perceiving a word and producing a word, or whether there are two different, but related representations. If there is a difference between perception and production in terms of benefit from multiple talkers, we will have evidence for different representations for perception and production, at least when a word is newly learned. A more nuanced understanding of the benefit of multiple talkers may inform methods for second language learning. More broadly, it may also shed light on how language is represented in the human mind.