Making words disappear or appear: A neurocognitive and behavioral investigation of effects of speech rate on spoken word recognition

让单词消失或出现：语速对口语单词识别影响的神经认知和行为研究

• 批准号: 1559719
• 负责人: Navin Viswanathan
• 金额: $ 5万
• 依托单位: University of Kansas Center for Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-09-01 至 2018-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1559719&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Making; words; disappear; appear; neurocognitive

Understanding how humans comprehend speech is an unsolved and challenging problem, in part because factors such as different speakers, dialects, and speaking rates introduce a great deal of temporal and spectral variability into the speech signal. The focus of this research is on the influence of temporal context on perception of segments, syllables, and words. Results of the research may offer insights into treatment of disorders that involve disruption of speech rate (e.g., dysarthria, stuttering, Parkinson's disease, and aphasia), inform approaches to improve speech technology applications (e.g., enhanced automatic speech recognition, more natural sounding computer-generated speech), and lead to new discoveries related to brain mechanisms involved in understanding spoken language. The investigators will also involve students in the research, including those from a primarily undergraduate institution collaborating on the project.The investigators will test different accounts of temporal phenomena in the perception of speech. They propose two interacting cognitive mechanisms controlling phenomena at lexical and phonetic levels, each driven by a different neural timing mechanism. The hypothesis is that effects of lexical rate primarily stem from top-down, speech-specific temporal expectancies, while phonetic rate effects originate in bottom-up, transient rhythmic expectations that are not specific to speech. This hypothesis will be assessed using psychoacoustic studies, non-invasive measures of brain activity, and theoretical modeling in order to identify the processing characteristics revealed by neural representations of temporal properties of speech.

了解人类如何理解语音是一个未解决和具有挑战性的问题，部分原因是诸如不同的说话者，方言和说话率之类的因素会在语音信号中引入大量的时间和频谱可变性。这项研究的重点是时间上下文对细分，音节和文字感知的影响。这项研究的结果可能会提供有关涉及言语率的疾病治疗的见解（例如，构想障碍，口吃，口吃，帕金森氏病和失语症），为改善语音技术应用的信息（例如，增强的自动语音识别，增强的自动语音识别，更自然的计算机启用语音）以及与大脑相关的新发现，并涉及大脑的语言。研究人员还将参与研究，包括主要是本科机构在项目中合作的本科机构的研究。他们提出了两种相互作用的认知机制，以控制词汇和语音水平的现象，每种都由不同的神经时机机制驱动。假设是，词汇速率的影响主要源于自上而下的语音特异性时间期望，而语音速率效应源于自下而上的，短暂的节奏期望，这些期望不是特定于语音的。该假设将使用心理声学研究，脑活动的非侵入性测量以及理论建模来评估，以确定语音时间特性的神经表示揭示的处理特征。