Collaborative Research: The interplay of production and perception in sound changes affecting US English

你说的方言决定了你听周围人说话的方式吗？在国家科学基金会的支持下，泰勒·肯德尔博士和瓦莱丽·弗里德兰博士将进行为期24个月的语言学研究，调查元音感知如何受到方言经验的影响。利用基于网络的感知实验来获得来自美国各地的参与，并记录这些参与受试者的一个子集的讲话，该项目将调查元音类别（例如，“ee”和“ih”）的感知和产生之间存在什么联系，以及这些类别是如何通过社区和个人层面的变化来调节的。特别是，该研究将研究影响美国英语三种主要方言（北部，南部和西部）的独特的区域元音变化是否有助于语音处理的更大多样性，以及除了语音产生之外，个人表现出这种元音变化的程度是否会影响他们与社区规范相关的语音处理。为了更好地理解社会影响对言语感知的影响，本研究将调查听者对说话者之间习得的社会差异（如地域关系或性别）的期望是否也会影响他们对元音的分类。越来越多的证据表明，社会衍生的语言变异提供的不仅仅是社会身份的线索，事实上，它在语音信号本身的实际处理和解码中起着关键作用。这一领域的研究应该被证明具有应用效益，例如为非母语/方言人群提供教育方法，以及为语音识别技术的发展提供信息。此外，对受不同方言经历影响的说话者的生产和感知范围的比较研究将为言语和听力科学以及社会语言学研究提供信息，有助于建立关于言语处理和声音变化本质的基本理论。

Does the dialect you speak determine how you hear the speech around you? With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Tyler Kendall and Dr. Valerie Fridland will conduct twenty-four months of linguistic research investigating how vowel perception is affected by dialect experience. Utilizing web-based perception experiments to gain participation from across the U.S., and recording speech from a subset of these participating subjects, the project will investigate what links exist between the perception and production of vowel categories (e.g., "ee" and "ih") and how these categories are mediated by variation at the level of the community and the individual. In particular, the research will examine whether distinctive regional vowel changes that affect three main dialects of American English (Northern, Southern and Western) are contributing to greater diversity in speech processing, in addition to speech production, and whether the degree to which individuals show such vowel changes themselves affects their speech processing in relation to their community norms. To gain a better understanding of the impact of social influences on speech perception, this research will investigate whether listeners' categorization of vowels is also affected by their expectations regarding learned social distinctions among speakers, such as regional affiliation or gender.Increasing evidence suggests that socially derived linguistic variation provides more than simply clues to social identity, and, in fact, plays a pivotal role in the actual processing and decoding of the speech signal itself. Research in this area should prove to have applied benefits such as informing educational approaches to non-native language/dialect populations and also to the development of voice recognition technologies. Further, comparative examination of the productive and perceptual range of speakers affected by different dialect experiences will inform both speech and hearing science and sociolinguistic research, contributing to basic theories about the nature of speech processing and of sound change.