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

为了成功地交流，人们需要能够解决令人难以置信的速度，每分钟听到大约200个口语音节。研究表明，大脑通过预测来处理这一问题。人们不是简单地在单词进入时进行解析，而是提前倾听：他们对将要听到的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，研究大多假设这些期望是一般性的，简单地基于哪些单词、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，人们是否将他们的预测适应于一个人可能使用而另一个人不使用的特殊词汇和概念。它依靠既定的方法，使用大脑电活动来衡量语言中的预测错误，并测试当单词通常是意想不到的但对特定说话者来说是预期的时，这些大脑反应是否不同，以及如果听者知道说话者不可靠并犯下许多语音错误，预测是否会被调整。此外，它还将测试在与已知语言困难的人互动时，加工过程是如何变化的，对这些人来说，期望是不可靠的。这项研究将帮助我们更好地理解是什么造就了人类优秀的语言使用者。它将为教育设置提供信息，帮助我们更好地构建信息来帮助学习，还会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.