Listening ahead: Do people form specific expectations about individual speakers?

为了成功沟通，人们需要能够解决每分钟听到200个左右口语音节的惊人速度。研究表明，大脑通过预测来处理这种情况。人们不是在听到单词时就去分辨，而是提前倾听：他们对下一个将要听到的单词形成特定的预期，这样这些单词就可以被有效地处理，只有在这些预测不正确的情况下才需要进行额外的处理。然而，到目前为止，研究大多假设这些期望是普遍的，仅仅基于对最有可能出现的单词、概念或结构的统计。这个项目首次测试了人们是否会以特定于说话者的方式形成预期，换句话说，人们是否会根据一个人可能使用而另一个人不会使用的特殊词汇和概念来调整他们的预测。它依赖于既定的方法来测量语言中的预测误差，使用脑电活动来测试大脑的反应是否不同，当话语通常是意料之外的，但对于特定的说话者来说是预料之中的，如果听者知道说话者不可靠，并且犯了很多错误，预测是否会调整。此外，它将测试在与已知有语言障碍的人互动时，处理过程是如何变化的，因为对这些人的期望是不可靠的。这项研究将帮助我们更好地理解是什么让人类成为优秀的语言使用者。它将为教育机构提供信息，帮助我们更好地构建有助于学习的信息框架，并告诉我们如何与语言障碍患者进行沟通。

To communicate successfully, people need to be able to resolve the incredible speed of hearing around 200 spoken syllables per minute. Research suggests that the brain deals with this through prediction. Rather than merely resolving words as they come in, people listen ahead: they form specific expectations about the next word they will hear so that these words can be processed efficiently, and additional processing is only needed if these predictions are incorrect. So far, however, research has mostly assumed that these expectations are general, based simply on statistics of which words, concepts, or structures are most likely. This project tests, for the first time, whether people form expectations in a speaker-specific way, in other words, whether people adapt their predictions to the idiosyncratic words and concepts one person is likely to use, but not another. It relies on established methods to measureprediction errors in language using electrical brain activity and tests whether these brain responses differ when words are generally unexpected but expected for this particular speaker and whether predictions are adjusted if the listener knows that a speaker is unreliable and makes many speech errors. Moreover, it will test how processing changes when interacting with persons with known language difficulties, for whom expectations are unreliable.This research will help us understand better what makes humans excellent language users. It will inform educational settings and help us to better frame information to aid learning, and also inform how we can go about communicating with individuals with language disorders.