Temporal dynamics of phonetic perceptual organization

科学家和工程师通过研究语言来理解为什么这种交流方式如此有效。他们还试图创造口语和听力设备，使其接近日常交流的准确性和便利性，但取得了一定的成功。这个研究问题很容易定义：英语由超过10万个单词组成，这些单词由超过1.6万个不同的音节组成，而音节则由几十个辅音和元音组成。如果这些语言特性——单词、音节、辅音、元音——能使说话者发出的声音一致，那么自动语音识别就会变得非常容易。事实上，无论是声音模式还是说话者面部的可见动作，每个话语在身体上都是独一无二的。男性、女性和儿童不同的声音解剖结构导致声音产生的复杂变化，即使语言信息是相同的。此外，说话者作品的某些方面可能表达了他们家庭和语言社区的方言和说话风格。人类听众很容易注意到这些个体和社会标记的声音暗示，同时也在倾听信息。这个项目将研究这些不同的言语感知信息来源是如何组织的，它们是如何随着时间的推移而整合的，以及它们是如何允许个体说话者的言语感知调整的。最终，对语音感知的更完整的描述可以导致识别技术的改进和辅助设备的创造。本研究将进行三个实验项目：1)评估听觉感觉整合的时间动态；2)确定基于暴露的感知调谐维度对个体谈话者特征的影响；3)描述和建模影响视听语音感知的听觉和视觉时间敏感性和持久性的内在差异。在每种情况下，将使用听觉和视听分辨率的判别性和鲁棒性测量来分析对语言特性、说话者特征和口语语言一般特征的感知敏感性。这些研究探索了应用于言语的感知能力的多样性，并提供了一个机会来确定支持和维持沟通的非常强大的感知能力背后的原则。总体目标是对确保口语交际在自然环境中感知稳定性的认知资源进行形式和功能表征，无论语音来源是否可见，说话者是否熟悉，以及语音感官样本的质量是否自然。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Scientists and engineers have studied speech to understand why this form of communication is so effective. They have also sought to create speaking and listening devices that approach the accuracy and ease of everyday communication, with modest success. The research problem has been easy to define: English is composed of more than 100,000 words created from over 16,000 different syllables and syllables are composed from a small inventory of several dozen consonants and vowels. Automatic speech recognition would be remarkably easy if these linguistic properties - words, syllables, consonants, vowels -produced uniformity in the sounds that talkers actually make. In fact, each utterance is also physically unique, whether in its sound pattern or in the visible movements of the speaker's face. Different vocal anatomy in men, women and children causes complex variation in sound production even when the linguistic message is the same. Moreover, aspects of a talker's productions may express the dialect and speaking style of their family and linguistic community. Human listeners readily attend to the acoustic hints of these individual and social markers while also listening for the message. This project will examine how these different sources of perceptual information for speech are organized, how they are integrated over time, and how they allow perceptual tuning to the speech of individual talkers. Ultimately, a more complete account of the perception of speech can lead to improvement in recognition technology and to the creation of assistive devices.Three experimental projects will be performed: 1) to estimate the temporal dynamics of auditory sensory integration; 2) to determine the dimensions of exposure-based perceptual tuning to the characteristics of individual talkers; and, 3) to describe and model the intrinsic differences in auditory and visual temporal sensitivity and persistence that affect audiovisual speech perception. In each instance, the perceptual sensitivity to linguistic properties, talker characteristics, and language general features of spoken language will be assayed using discriminating and robust measures of auditory and audiovisual resolution. The studies explore the versatility of perceptual faculties applied to speech and provide an opportunity to identify the principles underlying the remarkably robust perceptual abilities that support and sustain communication. The overall goal is a formal and functional characterization of the cognitive resources that insure the perceptual stability of spoken communication in natural environments, whether the source of speech is visible or not, whether the talker is familiar or not, and whether the quality of the sensory samples of speech is natural or not.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.