Doctoral Dissertation Research: Speech perception in younger and older adults: Cue-weighting and contextual information

博士论文研究：年轻人和老年人的言语感知：线索加权和上下文信息

• 批准号: 2141302
• 负责人: Allard Jongman
• 金额: $ 1.06万
• 依托单位: University of Kansas Center for Research Inc
• 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: 2022-02-15 至 2024-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2141302&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Speech; perception

The way listeners process speech sounds changes across the lifespan. A better understanding of the aging effect in its early stage (55-65 years old) contributes to the advancement of speech technology (e.g., hearing aids, voice user interfaces) to better fulfill the needs of an aging population. This dissertation investigates the influence of aging on speech perception by comparing speech perception in older vs. younger adults. The experiments investigate listeners’ use of the acoustic signal and contextual information, and test how listeners adapt to ambiguity in speech sounds. Listeners integrate multiple acoustic cues when identifying speech sounds. When the primary acoustic cue is ambiguous, listeners may rely more heavily on a secondary cue to ensure speech understanding. As older listeners experience reduced temporal processing abilities, it is possible that they compensate by weighing non-temporal acoustic cues more heavily in speech perception. Experiment 1 tests whether the age-related cue-weighting shift found previously in the perception of the difference between /b/ and /p/ extends to the /d/ vs. /t/ distinction. Listeners may also adjust their cue weighting depending on the nature of the input. Experiment 2 tests whether younger and older listeners use different cue-weighting adjustment strategies. Additionally, listeners may access stored information about words to help resolve ambiguities in the acoustic signal. Older listeners were previously found to use this lexical information to a greater degree than younger listeners. Experiment 3 explores whether younger and older adults differ in their use of lexical information when learning to interpret utterances that are ambiguous. A final goal of the dissertation is to test whether younger and older adults differ in how they handle changes in speaking rate. In Experiment 4, the effect of speaking rate is examined by embedding /d/ vs. /t/ contrasts in slow and fast speech contexts and presenting these syllables to younger and older listeners to compare their performance in identifying the sounds. The results of the four experiments contribute to our understanding of the human aging process.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.

听者处理语音的方式在人的一生中会发生变化。更好地了解早期阶段（55-65岁）的衰老效应有助于语音技术的进步（例如，助听器、语音用户界面），以更好地满足老龄化人口的需求。本论文通过比较老年人和年轻人的言语知觉来研究年龄对言语知觉的影响。实验研究了听者对声学信号和语境信息的使用，并测试了听者如何适应语音中的歧义。听者在识别语音时会整合多种声学线索。当主要的声学线索是模糊的，听众可能会更严重地依赖于次要线索，以确保语音理解。随着年龄的增长，听众的时间处理能力下降，他们可能会通过在语音感知中更重地权衡非时间声学线索来进行补偿。实验1测试了先前在对/B/和/p/之间的差异的感知中发现的与年龄相关的线索加权移位是否延伸到/d/与/t/之间的区别。听众也可以根据输入的性质调整他们的提示权重。实验二测试了年轻和年长的听者是否使用不同的线索加权调整策略。另外，收听者可以访问存储的关于单词的信息，以帮助解决声学信号中的歧义。以前发现，年长的听众使用这种词汇信息的程度比年轻的听众。实验3探讨了年轻人和老年人在学习解释模棱两可的话语时是否在词汇信息的使用上存在差异。论文的最后一个目标是测试年轻人和老年人在处理语速变化方面是否存在差异。在实验4中，通过在慢速和快速语音环境中嵌入/d/与/t/对比，并将这些音节呈现给年轻和年长的听众，以比较他们在识别声音方面的表现，来检查说话速率的影响。这四个实验的结果有助于我们对人类衰老过程的理解。该奖项反映了NSF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。