Doctoral Dissertation Research: Experimental priming of phonological variant choices

博士论文研究：语音变体选择的实验启动

• 批准号: 2234838
• 负责人: Meredith Tamminga
• 金额: $ 1.81万
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-02-15 至 2025-01-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2234838&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Experimental; priming

Language is highly variable such that words can have different pronunciations. For instance, in American English, the word WALKING can be pronounced as either walking or the more casual walkin'. Among the many social and linguistic factors shaping which option people choose, it is known that people tend to repeat the same pronunciation that they have recently used or heard. For example, an English speaker who just said or heard workin' becomes more likely to say playin' a few moments later, repeating the use of the casual -in' pronunciation even on a different word. In this doctoral dissertation project, the investigators use laboratory speech perception and production experiments to ask how basic properties of human cognition lead to this kind of repetitiveness in real-world language use. The results of the project have the long-term potential to help improve the capacity of language technology to handle the socially-meaningful variability that is pervasive in everyday language, to identify typical and atypical language use patterns in clinical settings, and generally to contribute to our scientific and cultural understanding of how humans communicate across a diverse range of language backgrounds.The repetitiveness effect described above, known as variant persistence, has often been attributed to a cognitive process called priming, where processing a particular linguistic form makes it easier to produce the same form again. This dissertation provides experimental evidence for priming variable pronunciations in perception and production through English words whose ending alternates between -ing and -in', connecting data from controlled laboratory experiments with data from informal conversational speech in order to understand the perception and production of socially-situated language variation. A series of laboratory experiments will be conducted to show that variable pronunciations can be primed in perception and to investigate how these priming effects may be weakened or strengthened under various circumstances. To tie more closely into previous work on variant persistence in large corpora of conversational speech data, the proposed experiments also examine priming of the variable pronunciations that individuals choose in speech production.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.

语言变化很大，因此单词可以有不同的发音。例如，在美式英语中，“WALKING”一词可以发音为“walking”或更随意的“walkin'”。在影响人们选择选项的众多社会和语言因素中，众所周知，人们倾向于重复他们最近使用或听到的相同发音。例如，说英语的人刚刚说或听到“workin”，几分钟后就更有可能说“playin”，即使在不同的单词上也重复使用随意的“-in”发音。在这个博士论文项目中，研究人员利用实验室语音感知和生成实验来探究人类认知的基本特性如何导致现实世界语言使用中的这种重复性。该项目的结果具有长期潜力，有助于提高语言技术的能力，以处理日常语言中普遍存在的具有社会意义的变异性，识别临床环境中的典型和非典型语言使用模式，并总体上有助于我们对人类如何在不同语言背景下进行交流的科学和文化理解。上述重复效应（称为变体持久性）通常归因于称为启动的认知过程， 处理特定的语言形式可以更容易地再次产生相同的形式。本论文为通过结尾在-ing和-in'之间交替的英语单词启动感知和生产中的可变发音提供了实验证据，将受控实验室实验的数据与非正式会话语音的数据联系起来，以理解社会情境语言变异的感知和产生。我们将进行一系列实验室实验，以证明不同的发音可以在感知中启动，并研究这些启动效应在不同情况下如何减弱或加强。为了更紧密地结合先前关于大型会话语音数据语料库中变异持久性的工作，拟议的实验还检查了个人在语音生成中选择的可变发音的启动。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。