Collaborative Research: The Individual Differences Corpus: A resource for testing and refining hypotheses about individual differences in speech production

演讲是一项非常私人的活动。当人类发出组成单词的元音和辅音，或者发出句子的节奏和旋律时，他们的发音方式彼此不同，即使是说同一种语言的人也是如此。虽然一个人发音的一些差异反映了他们来自特定的地区或他们所属的社会群体，但人们对人们说话的大多数差异仍然知之甚少。这种理解的缺乏给社会带来了挑战——令人惊讶的实际挑战，比如如何诊断言语和语言障碍（例如，哪些差异是病态的，哪些不是？）以及自动语音识别等技术应用如何运作（例如，哪些差异会给语音识别系统带来问题，哪些不会？）这个项目的目标是产生一个语音数据的语料库——这是同类中第一个公开可用的语料库——可以用来探索人们在语音模式上的差异的方式和原因。这个语料库——个体差异语料库——包括数以百计的英语母语者产生的数万个单词，为研究人员提供了检验一系列心理技能（如记忆、注意力）和人格特征（如自闭症特征、同理心）如何影响人们言语的科学假设所需的数据，对研究人员如何在社会、教育、技术和临床环境中处理言语相关差异具有启示意义。语音信号充满了变化。其中一些变体源于信息本身的形式（即语音和/或语音环境的影响），而另一些变体则源于说话的环境（例如，需要更快、更清晰或更少模棱两可的讲话）。然而，在讲话中发现的一些差异源于说话者自身，即个体差异。但是，说话者和听者的哪些方面导致了他们的差异，他们能告诉我们关于语言和语音产生系统的什么信息？本研究旨在创建个体差异语料库，这是一个公共可用的语料库资源，旨在解决有关语音产生中的个体差异的问题。该语料库的独特之处在于，它将(1)数百名母语为英语的人产生的数千个相互关联的单词与(2)对所有说话者的认知和社会概况的大量测量相结合，包括心理测量学上有效的测量，以及认知控制的几个维度（例如，工作记忆，处理速度，抑制），认知处理风格（例如，自闭症特征，同理心）等等。语料库的理论和经验潜力在两个语音生成计划的心理测量研究中得到了证明，这两个研究从韵律和片段的角度研究了计划。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。

Speaking is a surprisingly personal activity. When humans articulate the vowels and consonants that make up words, or produce the rhythm and melody of a sentence, they do so in ways that differ from each other – even from others who speak the same language. And while some of the differences in a person’s pronunciation reflect the specific region they come from or the social group they belong to, most of the variation in people’s speech remains poorly understood. This lack of understanding presents challenges to society – surprisingly practical ones, such as how speech and language disorders can be diagnosed (for example, which kinds of differences are pathological and which kinds aren’t?) as well as how technological applications such as automatic speech recognition operate (for example, which kinds of differences cause problems for a speech recognition system and which ones don’t?). The goal of this project is to produce a corpus of speech data – the first-ever publicly-available corpus of its kind – that can be used to explore the ways and reasons that people differ in their speech patterns. The corpus – the Individual Differences Corpus – includes tens of thousands of words produced by hundreds of native English speakers, providing researchers with the data needed to test scientific hypotheses about how a range of mental skills (e.g., memory, attention) and personality characteristics (e.g., autistic traits, empathy) influence people’s speech, with implications for how researchers approach speech-related differences in social, educational, technological and clinical contexts.Speech signals are rife with variation. Some of this variation derives from the form of the message itself (i.e., effects of phonetic and/or phonological context), while some derives instead from the speaking context (e.g., the need to produce faster, clearer or less ambiguous speech). However, some of the variation found in speech has its origins in speakers themselves – i.e., individual differences. But what aspects of speakers and listeners cause them to vary, and what can they tell us about the language and speech production systems? The present research aims to create the Individual Differences Corpus, a publicly-available corpus resource designed for approaching questions about individual differences in speech production. The corpus is unique in that it pairs (1) thousands of words of connected speech produced by hundreds of native English speakers with (2) a large battery of measurement of all speakers’ cognitive and social profiles, including psychometrically valid measurements along several dimensions of cognitive control (e.g., working memory, processing speed, inhibition), cognitive processing styles (e.g., autistic traits, empathy) and more. The theoretical and empirical potential of the corpus is demonstrated in two psychometric studies of speech production planning that investigate planning from both prosodic and segmental perspectives.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.