Collaborative Research: How Accent Distance Impacts Word Recognition Across the Lifespan

一个日益全球化的社会汇集了许多不同地区或非母语口音的人。这些发音差异会给成功的交流带来挑战，尤其是对于语言和认知仍在发展的儿童。事实上，对不熟悉方言和口音的说话者所产生的语言的成熟感知要到青春期后期才会形成。了解这些发音差异是如何以及何时导致交流中断的，对于促进来自不同文化、语言和年龄组的人的交流至关重要。该项目将有助于更好地了解特定的口音属性和听力情况如何影响儿童和成人跨方言和非母语口音的交流能力。本项目预计将通过表征音段、超音段和感知域内的口音距离，显著增加对区域方言和非母语口音变化如何影响儿童和成人单词识别的理解。建立可靠的、可预测的发音距离测量方法，是将成人和儿童对特定音素对比的感知与对不同方言和口音自然产生的句子的感知衔接起来的关键。本项目将建立一个定量的口音变化语音距离度量。对于各种各样的地区方言和非母语口音，将测量与母语（美国中部英语）的分段、超分段和感知距离。将对儿童和成人在安静环境和噪音环境下的单词识别准确率进行预测。该研究为一个可测试的单词识别模型提供了基础知识，该模型可以识别人一生中关键点上不熟悉的口音。这项研究带来的社会效益包括招募和留住女性和来自代表性不足群体的个人从事研究工作，通过社区参与和外展活动向公众提供科学教育，以及分享包括录音、数据集和实验代码在内的研究产品。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。

An increasingly globalized society brings together speakers with many different regional or nonnative accents. These pronunciation differences can pose challenges for successful communication, particularly in children, whose language and cognition are still developing. Indeed, mature perception of speech produced by talkers with unfamiliar dialects and accents does not develop until late adolescence. Understanding how and when these pronunciation differences lead to breakdowns in communication is essential for facilitating communication across people from different cultures, languages, and age groups. This project will result in a better understanding of how specific accent properties and listening situations contribute to children's and adults' ability to communicate across dialects and nonnative accents. This project is expected to markedly increase the understanding of how regional dialect and nonnative accent variation impact children's and adult's word identification by characterizing accent distance within the segmental, suprasegmental, and perceptual domains. Establishing reliable and predictive measures of pronunciation distance is a key to bridging work focusing on adults' and children's perception of specific phoneme contrasts and perception of naturally produced sentences of different dialects and accents. This project will establish a quantitative pronunciation distance metric of accent variation. Segmental, suprasegmental, and perceptual distance from the home dialect (Midland American English) for a wide variety of regional dialects and nonnative accents will be measured. The predictive value of the metrics will be assessed for children's and adults' word recognition accuracy in quiet and in noise. The research provides foundational knowledge for a testable word recognition model of unfamiliar accents at key points across the lifespan. Societal benefits resulting from the research include the recruitment and retention of women and individuals from underrepresented groups into research careers, provision of science education to the general public through community engagement and outreach activities, and the sharing of research products including audio recordings, datasets, and experimental code.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.