Formation and tuning of complex auditory categories

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目是一个合作研究计划的延续，以了解一般的听觉分类，因为它涉及到语音感知。语言学习者从许多说话者发出的经验语音的分布中形成母语声音的（语音）听觉类别。然而，这些平均类别可能与特定说话者产生的语音不相关。例如，非本族语可能不符合本族语者的正常模式。本申请中描述的项目检查人类将听觉类别“调谐”到特定收听情况的特征的能力。来自非母语和英语母语者的语音将被分析，以确定可能影响感知的声音分布的差异。这些产品将被呈现给听众（有时以操纵的形式）作为分类任务的前兆。语音声音分类受说话人特定信息影响的程度将被确定。两种可能的机制，这种能力将被审查。在一组实验中，语音之前会有非语音的前兆。这些前体保留了语音前体句子的一些声学结构，但没有语言/语音内容。语音分类的变化表明听觉系统根据周围环境声音的声学构成来调整分类。在另一系列实验中，听众将被训练对复杂的非语音声音的分布进行分类。经过训练后，分布图将发生变化。听众跟踪这些变化和保持最佳性能的能力将被检查。结果将表明的敏感性，听众的声音类别的分布特征的变化。两者合计，这些实验将提供洞察能力的听众，以适应正常的母语生产的扰动，更一般地说，通知理论的听觉分类。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project is a continuation of a collaborative research program to understand general auditory categorization as it relates to speech perception. Language learners form (phonetic) auditory categories of native-language sounds from the distributions of experienced speech sounds produced by many talkers. However, these averaged categories may not be relevant to the speech produced by a specific talker. For example, non-native speech may not adhere to the normal patterns of native speakers. The project described in this application examines the ability of humans to "tune" auditory categories to characteristics of the particular listening situation. Speech from non-native and native speakers of English will be analyzed to determine differences in the distributions of sounds that may affect perception. These productions will be presented to listeners (sometimes in manipulated forms) as precursors to a categorization task. The degree to which speech sound categorization is affected by talker-specific information will be ascertained. Two possible mechanisms underlying this ability will be examined. In one set of experiments, speech sounds will be preceded by non-speech precursors. These precursors retain some of the acoustic structure of the speech precursor sentences but none of the linguistic/phonetic content. Shifts in the categorization of the speech sounds will indictate that the auditory system tunes categories to the acoustic makeup of the surrounding context sounds. In another series of experiments, listeners will be trained to categorize distributions of complex non-speech sounds. After training, distributions regularities will change. The ability of listeners to track these changes and maintain optimal performance will be examined. The results will indicate the sensitivity of listeners to changes in the distributional characteristics of sound categories. Taken together, these experiments will provide insight into the ability of listeners to accommodate perturbations of normal native speech productions and, more generally, inform theories of auditory categorization.