Doctoral Dissertation Research: On-line Integration of Social and Linguistic Cues during Speech Perception

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How do social characteristics of a speaker influence how listeners process their speech? There is evidence that social characteristics, like a speaker's age, gender, and so forth, can shift how listeners respond to their speech. For example, ambiguous sounding words are recognized quicker and more accurately when matched with pictures of speakers who are likely to say those words, and changing a visual cue about a speaker while keeping the audio constant can change listeners' judgments of what they heard. An unanswered question is whether social information is directly affecting perception, or if it is only affecting later decision-making. This study investigates how listeners use social cues in real-time by measuring the cues' influence on the earliest stages of speech perception. This is critical to our understanding of the role of social information during speech perception and will further develop our models of human language processing. Additionally, a more robust understanding of how social and acoustic cues interact may lead to the development of targeted therapies for certain types of language disorders.Previous work has demonstrated that social cues can directly shift categorization behavior, but the paradigms used in the majority of this work do not allow conclusions to be drawn about the specific time-course of social and acoustic cue integration. The specific time-course of this process is critical to debates over the nature of linguistic representation (episodic vs. abstract) and processing (feed-forward vs. interactive models). This study investigates the following questions: whether social cues can influence on-line perception as detected via eye-tracking during (a) a Ganong task and (b) a compensation for coarticulation task, and (c) whether social cues can induce selective adaptation effects in perception. The data from these experiments will directly address questions of the time-course of speech perception and inform debates over the representations and structures of models of speech perception.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.