Collaborative Research: How Accent Distance Impacts Word Recognition Across the Lifespan

日益全球化的社会聚集了许多不同地区口音或非本土口音的演讲者。这些发音差异可能会给成功的沟通带来挑战，特别是对儿童来说，因为他们的语言和认知仍在发展中。事实上，对不熟悉方言和口音的人说话的成熟感知直到青春期后期才会形成。了解这些发音差异是如何以及何时导致交流中断的，对于促进来自不同文化、语言和年龄段的人之间的交流至关重要。这个项目将有助于更好地理解特定的口音特性和听力情景如何有助于儿童和成年人通过方言和非母语口音进行交流的能力。该项目希望通过表征音段、超音段和知觉领域的口音距离，显著提高对地区方言和非母语口音变化如何影响儿童和成人单词识别的理解。建立可靠和可预测的发音距离测量是衔接工作的关键，该工作的重点是成人和儿童对特定音素对比的感知以及对不同方言和口音的自然产生的句子的感知。这个项目将建立一个定量的口音变化的发音距离度量。将测量各种地区方言和非母语口音的音段、超音段和与家乡方言(米德兰美国英语)的感知距离。这些指标的预测价值将针对儿童和成人在安静和噪音中的单词识别准确性进行评估。这项研究为一个可测试的单词识别模型提供了基础知识，该模型在整个生命周期的关键时刻识别不熟悉的口音。这项研究产生的社会利益包括招募和留住代表不足群体中的妇女和个人进入研究事业，通过社区参与和外联活动向普通公众提供科学教育，以及分享研究产品，包括录音、数据集和实验代码。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

An increasingly globalized society brings together speakers with many different regional or nonnative accents. These pronunciation differences can pose challenges for successful communication, particularly in children, whose language and cognition are still developing. Indeed, mature perception of speech produced by talkers with unfamiliar dialects and accents does not develop until late adolescence. Understanding how and when these pronunciation differences lead to breakdowns in communication is essential for facilitating communication across people from different cultures, languages, and age groups. This project will result in a better understanding of how specific accent properties and listening situations contribute to children's and adults' ability to communicate across dialects and nonnative accents. This project is expected to markedly increase the understanding of how regional dialect and nonnative accent variation impact children's and adult's word identification by characterizing accent distance within the segmental, suprasegmental, and perceptual domains. Establishing reliable and predictive measures of pronunciation distance is a key to bridging work focusing on adults' and children's perception of specific phoneme contrasts and perception of naturally produced sentences of different dialects and accents. This project will establish a quantitative pronunciation distance metric of accent variation. Segmental, suprasegmental, and perceptual distance from the home dialect (Midland American English) for a wide variety of regional dialects and nonnative accents will be measured. The predictive value of the metrics will be assessed for children's and adults' word recognition accuracy in quiet and in noise. The research provides foundational knowledge for a testable word recognition model of unfamiliar accents at key points across the lifespan. Societal benefits resulting from the research include the recruitment and retention of women and individuals from underrepresented groups into research careers, provision of science education to the general public through community engagement and outreach activities, and the sharing of research products including audio recordings, datasets, and experimental code.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.