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

为了成功地沟通，人们需要能够分辨出每分钟大约200个音节的惊人听力速度。研究表明，大脑通过预测来处理这一问题。人们并不是在单词出现时就进行解析，而是提前倾听：他们会对下一个单词形成特定的预期，以便有效地处理这些单词，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，研究大多假设这些预期是普遍的，仅仅基于哪些单词，概念或结构最有可能的统计数据。这个项目首次测试了人们是否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的特殊词汇和概念来调整他们的预测，而不是另一个人。它依赖于既定的方法来测量预测错误的语言使用脑电活动和测试是否这些大脑的反应不同时，单词通常是意想不到的，但预期为这个特定的扬声器和是否预测调整，如果听众知道扬声器是不可靠的，使许多语音错误。此外，它还将测试在与已知有语言困难的人互动时，处理过程的变化，对他们来说，期望是不可靠的。这项研究将帮助我们更好地了解是什么使人类成为优秀的语言使用者。它将为教育环境提供信息，帮助我们更好地构建信息以帮助学习，并告知我们如何与语言障碍患者进行交流。

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.