The Effect of Dialect Experience on the Perception of Regional American Vowel Variation: Identification, Discrimination and Sociolinguistic Norms

在国家科学基金会的支持下，Valerie Fridland博士将进行为期18个月的语言研究，调查元音感知如何受到方言经验的影响。在过去的十年里，社会语言学家对影响美国不同地区说话人元音系统的低水平语音变化进行了描述性的描述。其中一些变化导致了地区元音产生更大的趋同，但许多变化实际上导致了更大的差异。美国的非裔美国人群体似乎只有限地参与了其中的许多转变，这些转变主要与欧洲裔美国人的演讲有关。虽然这样的研究阐明了元音是如何在全国范围内产生的，但人们对说这种变化的人在地区和种族群体内部和之间是如何感知的知之甚少。此外，这些变化对跨方言可理解性的影响还没有被探索。这项研究建立在先前支持的研究和实验性言语知觉研究奠定的基础上，考察了言语知觉是如何由社会和语言经验塑造的，解决了生命周期中的变化问题以及社会和地区差异对知觉的影响。为了更好地了解这种富有成效的变化对我们如何听到和理解语音的影响，本研究将调查元音产生的变化如何影响说话者对语音和音位边界的识别，以及这种跨方言和种族群体的差异趋势是否会导致更大的跨方言混乱。通过工具合成的知觉测试、产出数据和跨方言比较，这项研究希望深入了解一些流行的关于声音变化的起源和扩散以及知觉和产出在一生中的流动性的主张。这些领域的研究应该具有理论和应用两方面的好处，从对声音变化性质的基本理论的贡献，到围绕国家课程和测试教育标准的发展的讨论，成人语言学习者调整其语音系统各方面的能力，以及教材开发中的跨方言理解问题。在教育领域之外，对受不同地区和民族方言经验影响的说话者的生产和感知范围进行比较检查，可以帮助开发基于计算机的语音技术。如果研究能够衡量美国主要地区和社会群体之间的生产和感知差异，那么在广泛应用语音制作和语音识别软件方面面临的困难并不是不可逾越的。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Valerie Fridland will conduct eighteen months of linguistic research investigating how vowel perception is affected by dialect experience. In the past decade, sociolinguists have provided descriptive accounts of low level phonetic changes that are affecting the vowel systems of speakers in various regions of the U.S. Some of these changes are creating greater convergence in regional vowel production, but many are actually contributing to greater divergence. African-American groups in the U.S. appear to have only limited participation in many of these shifts, which are predominately associated with European-American speech. While such research illuminates how vowel sounds are produced across the country, little is known about how such changes are perceived by speakers within and among regions and ethnic groups. In addition, the impact of such changes on cross-dialectal intelligibility has not been explored. Building on previously supported research and groundwork laid by experimental speech perception research, this project examines how speech perception is shaped by both social and linguistic experience, addressing questions of change across the lifespan and the impact of social and regional variation on perception. To gain a better understanding of the impact such productive changes have on how we hear and understand speech, this research will investigate how shifts in vowel production shape speakers' recognition of phonetic and phonemic boundaries and whether such divergent trends across dialects and ethnic groups lead to greater cross-dialect confusion. Through the combination of instrumentally-synthesized perception tests, production data and cross-dialect comparison, the study hopes to gain insight into some of the prevailing claims about the origins and diffusion of sound change and the fluidity of perception and production across the lifespan.Research in these areas should have both theoretical and applied benefits, from contributing to basic theories about the nature of sound change to the discussion surrounding the growth of national education standards for curricula and testing, the ability of adult language learners to adjust aspects of their phonological system, and issues of cross-dialectal comprehension in the development of educational materials. Beyond the educational sphere, comparative examination of both the productive and perceptual range of speakers affected by different regional and ethnic dialect experience can assist in the development of computer-based voice technology. Difficulties faced in the wide application of speech production and voice recognition software need not be insurmountable if research can calibrate productive and perceptual differences among major regional and social groups across the U.S.