The seeds and spread of sound change: Individual differences in coarticulatory patterns

声音变化的种子和传播：协同发音模式的个体差异

• 批准号: 2140183
• 负责人: Georgia Zellou
• 金额: $ 21.86万
• 依托单位: University of California-Davis
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-07-01 至 2024-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2140183&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: seeds; spread; sound; change; Individual

This project investigates contextual variation in the pronunciation of consonants and vowels when they occur next to other sounds. This is known as 'coarticulation'. An example is that when pronouncing the word 'bone', speakers begin the movement needed to produce the nasal 'n' sound early, during the pronunciation of the preceding 'o' vowel. What aspects of this articulatory overlap are universal across speakers and what aspects can vary across speakers? This project addresses that question by examining how speakers of American English vary in their coarticulation patterns producing the same set of words. Since coarticulation provides advance information about upcoming sounds in the word, it can be used predictively by listeners to comprehend speech more efficiently. How do listeners adapt to cross-speaker variation when using coarticulation to comprehend speech? This question is addressed by investigating how listeners track and use cross-talker coarticulatory variation during word comprehension. Finally, coarticulation has played a prominent role in explaining common historical sound changes, and this project addresses the role of coarticulatory variation in leading to historical variation across languages. This research will contribute to our basic understanding of speech and can facilitate better treatment of speech and language disorders. It will also contribute to the training and mentoring of a future generation of scientists (including undergraduates, graduate students, and a postdoctoral researcher). The project's first objective is to characterize individual differences in coarticulation using acoustic and perceptual assessments. Experiment 1 identifies talker-specific relationships between prosodic organization, nasal-coarticulatory, oral articulations, and voice quality in order to typologize the coarticulation production grammars of 100 speakers of American English. Experiment 2 perceptually defines individual variation in the grammatical specification of coarticulatory vowel nasalization produced by these speakers. The goal is to typologize cross-speaker variation using the same conventions used to define cross-linguistic coarticulatory variation, relating synchronic coarticulatory variation across individuals to cross-linguistically phonologized phonetic patterns. The prediction is that the types of variation in produced coarticulatory patterns that are seen across languages also exist systematically across individual speakers. Objective 2 is to investigate the influence of perceptual learning of talker-specific coarticulatory patterns on listener-based sound change mechanisms. Experiments 3 and 4 investigate perceptual adaptation to talker-specific patterns of coarticulation, exploring how listener adaptation to talker-specific coarticulation patterns is an integral mechanism of phonologization. The prediction is that perceptual learning of coarticulation is helpful because it allows listeners to both be flexible and predict how a given talker is going to produce a word. This mechanism can also be integrated into listener-oriented mechanisms of sound change to explain how different coarticulation patterns phonologize. The project tests novel extensions of listener-based sound change accounts that integrates perceptual adaptation to talker-specific coarticulatory patterns in order to account for how novel coarticulatory patterns phonologize.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.

该项目研究辅音和元音与其他声音一起出现时发音的语境变化。这称为“协同发音”。一个例子是，当发音“bone”这个词时，说话者在前面的“o”元音的发音过程中，很早就开始发出鼻音“n”音所需的运动。这种发音重叠的哪些方面对于不同的说话者来说是通用的，哪些方面对于不同的说话者来说是不同的？该项目通过研究美式英语使用者在产生同一组单词时的发音模式有何不同来解决这个问题。由于协同发音提供了有关单词中即将出现的声音的预先信息，因此听众可以预测性地使用它来更有效地理解语音。当使用协同发音来理解语音时，听众如何适应说话者之间的变化？通过调查听众在单词理解过程中如何跟踪和使用串讲者的协同发音变化来解决这个问题。最后，协同发音在解释常见的历史声音变化方面发挥了突出作用，该项目探讨了协同发音变异在导致跨语言历史变异中的作用。这项研究将有助于我们对言语的基本理解，并有助于更好地治疗言语和语言障碍。它还将有助于培养和指导下一代科学家（包括本科生、研究生和博士后研究员）。该项目的第一个目标是通过声学和感知评估来表征协同发音的个体差异。实验 1 识别了特定于说话者的韵律组织、鼻音协同发音、口语发音和语音质量之间的关系，以便对 100 名美式英语使用者的发音发音语法进行类型化。实验2从感知上定义了这些说话者产生的协同元音鼻化的语法规范的个体差异。目标是使用与定义跨语言协同发音变化相同的约定来对跨说话者变化进行类型化，将个体之间的同步协同发音变化与跨语言音系化的语音模式联系起来。预测是，跨语言所产生的协同发音模式的变异类型也系统地存在于各个说话者之间。目标 2 是研究说话者特定协同发音模式的感知学习对基于听者的声音变化机制的影响。实验 3 和 4 研究了对说话者特定协同发音模式的感知适应，探索听者对说话者特定协同发音模式的适应如何成为语音化的一个完整机制。预测是，协同发音的感知学习是有帮助的，因为它可以让听众变得灵活，并预测给定的说话者将如何说出一个词。该机制还可以集成到面向听众的声音变化机制中，以解释不同的发音模式如何音系化。该项目测试了基于听者的声音变化帐户的新颖扩展，该帐户将感知适应与说话者特定的协同发音模式相结合，以解释新颖的协同发音模式如何语音化。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。