Doctoral Dissertation Research: Experimental priming of phonological variant choices

语言是高度多变的，单词可以有不同的发音。例如，在美式英语中，WALKING这个单词既可以读成WALKING，也可以读成更随意的walkin'。在影响人们选择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，一个说英语的人刚刚说或听到了“workin”，过一会儿就更有可能说“playin”，甚至在不同的单词上重复使用“casual -in”的发音。在这个博士论文项目中，研究人员使用实验室语音感知和生成实验来研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。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。上面描述的重复效应，被称为变体持久性，通常被归因于一种被称为启动的认知过程，在这种过程中，处理一种特定的语言形式会更容易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在感知和产生中启动可变发音提供了实验证据，将受控实验室实验数据与非正式会话语音数据联系起来，以了解社会情境下语言变化的感知和产生。我们将进行一系列的实验室实验，以证明不同的发音可以在感知中被启动，并研究这些启动效应在不同情况下是如何被削弱或加强的。为了更紧密地结合之前关于大型会话语音数据语料库中变体持久性的研究，提出的实验还研究了个体在语音生成中选择的可变发音的启动。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。

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.