PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION OF PHONOLOGICAL SEQUENCES

描述（由申请人提供）：本项目研究语音序列的产生和感知。我们的指导假设是语音处理系统是不断变化的。它适应最近的经验，同时继续反映一生的口语和听力积累的经验。该研究旨在了解语音处理系统的适应性，重点是系统使用一般语音模式的可塑性，如语音趋同限制。众所周知，言语错误或“口误”表现出语音规则效应：错误很少会造成所讲语言中不合法的声音组合。例如，说英语的人可能会把“nun”读错为“nung”，但不会把“ngung”读错，因为这违反了英语的限制，即“ng”不能作为音节的开头。我们创建了一个实验室模拟这种效果，并用它来演示学习。实验对象背诵一串音节，其中辅音被人为地限制在音节中的特定位置；例如，/f/总是出现在音节的开头。当受试者经历这些音节时，他们的口溜对辅音的分布变得非常敏感。例如，几乎每一个/f/的错位都遵循/f/是这个实验的开始的规则。这些数据表明，受试者内隐地学习了声音分布，这种学习影响了他们的产出。我们在感知上也证明了同样的效果。受试者听有辅音位置限制的音节；在后来的快速重复任务中，与实验语音策略一致的新音节比不一致的音节被重复得更快。本研究利用这些技术来研究语音加工系统中的学习机制。这些研究操纵了待习得的语音模式，并直接比较了成人和婴儿的产生和感知以及学习之间的差异。这些实验以心理学学习理论和语言学表征理论为基础，所获得的数据将用于限制语音加工系统中内隐学习计算模型的发展。这项研究将产生对处理系统如何对经验作出反应的新理解，最终将有助于语言障碍的治疗和语言教育学。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project studies the production and perception of phonological sequences. Our guiding assumption is that the phonological processing system is constantly changing. It adapts to recent experience, while continuing to reflect the accumulated experience of a lifetime of speaking and listening. The proposed research seeks to understand the adaptability of the phonological processing system, with an emphasis on the malleability of the system's use of general phonological patterns, such as phonotactic constraints. It is well known that speech errors or "slips of the tongue" exhibit the phonotactic regularity effect: Errors rarely create combinations of sounds that are illegal in the language being spoken. For example, an English speaker might mispronounce "nun" as "nung", but not "ngung" because that violates the constraint of English that "ng" can never begin a syllable. We created a laboratory analog to this effect and used it to demonstrate learning. Experimental subjects recited strings of syllables in which consonants were artificially restricted to particular positions in syllables; for example, /f/ always occurred as a syllable onset. As subjects experienced these syllables, their slips became strongly sensitive to the distributions of the consonants. For example, nearly every misplacement of /f/ obeyed the rule that /f/ is an onset for this experiment. These data suggest that subjects implicitly learned the sound distributions, and this learning affected their productions. We demonstrated the same effect in perception. Subjects listened to syllables with consonant-position restrictions; in a later speeded repetition task, new syllables that were consistent with the phonotactics of the experiment were repeated more rapidly than syllables that were inconsistent. The proposed research uses these techniques to investigate learning mechanisms in the phonological processing system. The studies manipulate the phonological patterns to be acquired and make direct comparisons between production and perception and between learning by adults and infants. These experiments are informed by psychological theories of learning and linguistic theories of representation, and the obtained data will be used to constrain development of computational models of implicit learning in the phonological processing system. The research will yield a new understanding of how the processing system responds to experience, which ultimately will contribute to the treatment of language disorders and to language pedagogy.