The Relationship between Perception and Production of Foreign Language Sequences

学习一门新的语言包括发展听和产生新的声音和声音序列的能力。这个项目将使用语言学，心理学和神经生理学的方法来确定为什么一些外语结构比其他结构更容易掌握。目标是确定语言学习者是否？发音问题源于知觉错误，以及知觉错误发生在什么样的加工水平上。2将采用两种类型的方法：辨别任务，在这种任务中，听者判断两个刺激是相同的还是不同的; 3 ERP（事件相关电位），测量听觉系统对听觉刺激变化的自动反应。这两种方法的结合将有助于确定听众是否真的听不到声音差异，而这些差异对于区分外语中的单词而不是母语中的单词是至关重要的，或者确实听到了这些差异，但只是不能正确地对它们进行分类。这将是使用行为和神经生理探针来研究外语序列的相对可感知性的首批研究之一。这些发现将为外语教学提供信息，有助于更好地理解为什么某些外语结构比其他结构更难掌握，为什么会出现特定的发音错误，以及外语感知培训是否有助于生产。这些发现也将对有关负责语言处理的神经结构可塑性的假设产生重要影响。

Learning a new language involves developing the abilities to hear and produce new sounds and sound sequences. This project will use the methodology of linguistics, psychology, and neurophysiology to determine why some foreign language structures are mastered more easily than others. The goals are to determine whether language learners? problems in pronunciation originate from errors of perception, and at what level of processing the perception errors occur.Two types of methodology will be employed: discrimination tasks, in which listeners judge two stimuli as the same or different; and ERP (event related potentials), which measure automatic responses of the auditory system to changes in auditory stimuli. This combination of methods will help to determine whether listeners actually fail to hear the acoustic differences that are crucial in distinguishing words in the foreign language but not in their native language, or do hear the differences but simply fail to categorize them correctly.This will be one of the first studies to investigate the relative perceptibility of foreign language sequences using both behavioral and neurophysiological probes. The findings will inform foreign language instruction, contributing to a better understanding of why some foreign structures are more difficult to master than others, why particular patterns of mispronunciation occur, and whether training in perception of foreign languages facilitates production. The findings will also have important implications for hypotheses concerning the plasticity of the neural structures responsible for language processing.