Influences of high-level knowledge and low-level perception in accented-speech processing across development

我们生活在一个联系日益紧密的世界里，因此，我们经常与听起来和我们不同的人交流——他们有不同的口音。如果说同一种语言的两个人在不同的地方长大（加利福尼亚vs新西兰），或者如果两个人的母语不同（美国英语vs墨西哥西班牙语），口音差异就会产生。因为不同的口音使用不同的发音来表达同一种语言，所以会导致混淆。例如，如果一个西班牙口音的人报告说看到外面有一只“羊”，他们是指一只毛茸茸的哺乳动物还是一艘大型远洋船只？本研究探讨了可能对幼儿和成人的口音言语理解产生积极影响的两个因素。其中一个因素是感知学习，即储存关于西班牙口音单词发音的新的心理表征。例如，孩子们可能在潜意识层面上学习到，英语“ih”元音的西班牙口音版本在声学上与英语“ee”元音非常相似。第二个因素是语言语境，比如在一个语义上似乎合理的句子中听到一个重音单词，比如“我们在一个大_中横渡海洋。”这个项目的潜在积极影响是科学的和社会的。在科学上，该项目将增加对儿童和成人感知类别学习的理解。它将阐明感知学习和句子上下文等高级知识如何共同影响重音语音理解，这不仅可以提高人类的感知能力，还将为计算机识别语音的方式提供潜在的改进。该项目还将生成一组高概率和低概率句子来研究儿童实验中的口音理解（SAUCE）。这个句子集将公开供其他科学家使用，从而加快在不同领域的语音理解实验的步伐，如口音感知、嘈杂环境中的语音处理和人工耳蜗（人工听力设备）的语音感知。西班牙语-英语双语研究人员是STEM领域中代表性不足的群体，他们的语言专长将被招募，并将在他们协助开展研究时得到指导，从而提高整体的科学参与。在社交方面，该项目将建议听众如何最好地提高他们的口音理解能力，促进在学校、工作场所和媒体中的交流。

We live in an increasingly interconnected world, and as a result, we often interact with speakers who sound different from us--they have different accents. Accent differences can result if two speakers of the same language grew up in different places (California vs. New Zealand), or if two speakers have different native languages (US English vs. Mexican Spanish). Because different accents use different sets of sounds to produce the same language, confusion can result. For instance, if a Spanish-accented speaker reports seeing a "sheep" outside, do they mean a wool-covered mammal or a large ocean-going vessel? This proposal examines two factors that may positively affect accented-speech comprehension in young children and in adults. One factor is perceptual learning, storing new mental representations of how Spanish-accented words sound. For instance, children may learn, at a subconscious level, that Spanish-accented versions of the English "ih" vowel are very acoustically similar to the English "ee" vowel. A second factor is language context, such as hearing an accented word in a semantically-plausible sentence like "We sailed across the ocean in a large _." The potential positive impacts of this project are both scientific and social. Scientifically, the project will increase understanding of perceptual-category learning in children and adults. It will clarify how perceptual learning and high-level knowledge like sentence context jointly influence accented-speech comprehension, which can improve not only human perception, but will suggest potential improvements to how computers recognize speech. The project will also generate a set of high- and low-probability Sentences to study Accent Understanding in Child Experiments (SAUCE). This sentence set will be made publicly available for other scientists to use, accelerating the pace of experimentation in speech comprehension in areas as diverse as accent perception, speech processing in noisy environments, and speech perception with cochlear implants (artificial hearing devices). Spanish-English bilingual researchers, a group who tend to be underrepresented in STEM fields, will be recruited for their language expertise, and will be mentored as they assist in conducting the research, increasing overall scientific participation. Socially speaking, the project will suggest how listeners can best improve their accent comprehension, facilitating communication in schools, workplaces, and the media.