Time course of spoken word recognition

目前拨款提案的总体目标是描述听众在流利的演讲中识别单词的过程。本研究从词汇邻域、亚音素声学/语音变异和嵌入性词汇竞争三个方面考察了连续语音中词汇识别过程中被激活的竞争者集合的性质。还将启动一项关于知觉学习的新研究计划。当参与者按照口头指令(用鼠标)拿起并移动电脑显示器上的具体物体的线条图时，眼睛的运动将被监测(例如，“拿起糖果。现在把它放在圆圈上面”)。这些研究将提供迄今为止关于连续言语中词汇激活时间进程的最细微信息。显式链接假设的可用性意味着这些数据可以用来比较和对比那些足够明确的模型，这些模型足以随着时间的推移为候选词汇生成预测的激活。这项研究将有助于弥合口语识别研究和语音知觉研究之间的差距，并将为知觉学习对词汇加工的影响提供重要的新信息。这一结果将对口语单词识别模型具有重要意义，也将为研究神经损伤对口语单词识别的影响以及儿童词汇发展模型提供信息。此外，由于眼动范式不依赖于元语言判断，这对这些人群来说是困难的，它可以很容易地扩展到对脑损伤患者、幼儿和婴儿的实证研究。

The overall goal of the present grant proposal is to characterize the process by which listeners recognize words in fluent speech. The proposed research examines the nature of the competitor set that is activated during word recognition in contnuous speech, focusing on lexical neighborhoods, sub-phonemic acoustic/phonetic variation and embedded lexical competitors. A novel program of research on perceptual learning will also be initiated. Eye movements will be monitored as participants follow spoken instructions to pick up and move (with a mouse) line drawings of concrete objects on a computer monitor (e.g., "pick up the candy. now put it above the circle".) These studies will provide the finest grained information to date about the time course of lexical activation in continuous speech. The availability of an explicit linking hypothesis means that these data can be used to compare and contrast models that are explicit enough to generate predicted activations over time for lexical candidates. The proposed research will help bridge the gap between research on spoken word recognition research and research on speech perception and it will provide important new information about the effects of perceptual learning on lexical processing. The results will be important for models of spoken word recognition, and will also inform models of the effects of neurological damage on spoken word recognition and models of lexical development in children. Moreover, because the eye movement paradigm does not rely on meta-linguistic judgments that are difficult for these populations, it can be easily extended to empirical investigations of brain-damaged patients, young children, and infants.