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

这个项目研究辅音和元音发音的语境变化，当它们出现在其他声音旁边时。这就是所谓的“共构”。一个例子是，当发音单词“bone”时，说话者开始产生鼻音“n”的运动，在前面的“o”元音发音期间。这种发音重叠的哪些方面在说话者之间是普遍的，哪些方面可以在说话者之间有所不同？这个项目解决了这个问题，通过研究美国英语的发言者如何在他们的协同发音模式产生相同的一组单词的变化。由于协同发音提供了关于单词中即将出现的声音的预先信息，因此它可以被听者预测性地使用以更有效地理解语音。当使用协同发音来理解语音时，听者如何适应跨话者的变化？这个问题是通过调查听众如何跟踪和使用相声coarticulatory变化在单词理解。最后，协同发音在解释共同的历史声音变化方面发挥了突出的作用，本项目讨论了协同发音变化在导致语言历史变化方面的作用。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。它还将有助于培训和指导下一代科学家（包括本科生，研究生和博士后研究人员）。该项目的第一个目标是使用声学和感知评估来表征协同发音的个体差异。实验1确定了特定于谈话者的韵律组织，鼻coarticulatory，口语发音，和语音质量之间的关系，以类型化的coarticulation生产语法的100美国英语发言者。实验2感性地定义了这些扬声器产生的coarticulatory元音鼻化的语法规范的个体差异。我们的目标是使用相同的公约来定义跨语言coarticulatory变化，跨个人的跨语言的语音模式的同步coarticulatory变化类型化的跨扬声器的变化。预测是，在不同语言中所看到的共同发音模式的变化类型也系统地存在于个体说话者之间。目的二是探讨说话人特定协同发音模式的知觉学习对基于发音人的音变机制的影响。实验3和实验4考察了听者对特定说话者协同发音模式的感知适应，探讨了听者对特定说话者协同发音模式的适应是语音化的一个不可或缺的机制。预测是，感知学习协同发音是有帮助的，因为它允许听众既灵活又预测给定的说话者将如何产生一个单词。这一机制也可以整合到以发音者为导向的语音变化机制中，以解释不同的协同发音模式如何音位化。该项目测试了基于发音者的声音变化账户的新颖扩展，该账户将感知适应整合到说话者特定的coarticulatory模式，以解释新颖的coarticulatory模式如何音位化。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得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来支持。

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.