Understanding British Accents in Noise

在嘈杂的环境下，说话者和听话者之间的口音差异会干扰个人相互理解的能力。例如，听者最擅长理解符合自己口音或标准口音的讲话（例如，媒体中经常使用的英国南部口音），但其他口音在噪音中会迅速退化。这些口音影响可能很大，类似于轻度听力损失的影响。噪音和口音对儿童、老年人和有听力障碍的人来说尤其成问题。因此，噪声中的这些重音效应对现实世界的语音交流具有实际意义，但对这些效应的研究也具有更广泛的科学意义，使我们能够解决语音可塑性和人类语音处理架构的基本问题。这项研究的总体目标是了解英式英语使用者和听者之间的口音差异为什么以及如何使语音识别在嘈杂的环境中变得困难。我们将测试(i)听者是否具有多方言（即能够理解许多不同的口音，而不仅仅是与他们自己相似的口音），以及（ii）口音和噪音的困难是来自大脑语音处理的早期阶段，还是来自与单词识别相关的后期处理阶段。我们的实验将包括测试各种英式英语口音的人。我们将测试他们识别不同口音和混合噪音的语音的能力，从声学角度分析他们自己的口音，并使用神经生理学测量（脑电图；EEG）来评估不同类型的语音处理。这种跨学科的测量和技术集合将用于解决与社会语音学相关的问题（例如，为什么某些口音成为标准，以及多方言经验的影响），言语科学（例如，哪些因素解释了言语的可理解性）和心理学（例如，言语在大脑中是如何处理的，以及成年人的感知学习能力），并以一种对理解英国人如何沟通有实际意义的方式来理解。

Accent differences among speakers and listeners can interfere with the ability of individuals to understand each other under noisy conditions. For example, listeners are best at understanding speech that matches either their own accent or standard accents (e.g., southern British accents that are frequently used in the media), but other accents can rapidly deteriorate in noise. These accent effects can be large, similar to the effect of having a mild hearing loss. Noise and accents can be particularly problematic for children, older adults, and individuals with hearing impairments. These accent effects in noise thus have practical importance for real-world speech communication, but the investigation of these effects also has broader scientific implications, allowing us to address fundamental issues of speech plasticity and the architecture of human speech processing.The overall aim of this research is to understand why and how accent differences among British English speakers and listeners can make speech recognition difficult in noisy conditions. We will test whether (i) listeners are multidialectal (i.e., able to understand many different accents, not only ones that are similar to their own), and (ii) whether the difficulties with accents and noise come from early stages of speech processing in the brain, or at later processing stages associated with the recognition of words. Our experiments will involve testing individuals with a wide range of British English accents. We will test their ability to recognize speech spoken in different accents and mixed with noise, acoustically analyze their own speech in terms of accent, and use neurophysiological measures (Electroencephalography; EEG) to assess different types of speech processing. This interdisciplinary collection of measures and techniques will be used to address questions that are relevant to sociophonetics (e.g., why certain accents become standards, and the impacts of multidialectal experience), speech science (e.g., which factors explain speech intelligibility) and psychology (e.g., how speech is processed in the brain, and the perceptual learning abilities of adults), and do so in a way that will have practical relevance to understanding how people communicate in the UK.