Doctoral Dissertation Research: On-line Integration of Social and Linguistic Cues during Speech Perception

说话人的社会特征如何影响听者对他的讲话的加工？有证据表明，社会特征，如说话者的年龄，性别等，可以改变听众对他们讲话的反应。例如，当与可能说这些话的说话者的图片相匹配时，模糊的发音单词会更快，更准确地识别出来，并且在保持音频不变的同时改变关于说话者的视觉提示可以改变听众对他们所听到的内容的判断。一个尚未回答的问题是，社会信息是否直接影响感知，或者它是否只影响后来的决策。本研究通过测量社会线索对言语感知早期阶段的影响，来考察听者如何实时使用社会线索。这对我们理解社会信息在言语感知中的作用至关重要，并将进一步发展我们的人类语言处理模型。此外，一个更强大的了解如何社会和声音的线索相互作用可能会导致针对某些类型的语言disorders.Previous工作的发展，社会线索可以直接改变分类行为，但在大多数这项工作中使用的范式不允许得出结论的具体时间过程中的社会和声学线索整合。这一过程的具体时间过程对于语言表征（情景与抽象）和处理（前馈与交互模型）的性质的辩论至关重要。本研究探讨了以下问题：（a）Ganong任务和（B）协同发音补偿任务中，社会线索是否影响在线知觉，以及（c）社会线索是否诱导知觉的选择性适应效应。这些实验的数据将直接解决言语感知的时间过程问题，并为言语感知模型的表征和结构的辩论提供信息。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

How do social characteristics of a speaker influence how listeners process their speech? There is evidence that social characteristics, like a speaker's age, gender, and so forth, can shift how listeners respond to their speech. For example, ambiguous sounding words are recognized quicker and more accurately when matched with pictures of speakers who are likely to say those words, and changing a visual cue about a speaker while keeping the audio constant can change listeners' judgments of what they heard. An unanswered question is whether social information is directly affecting perception, or if it is only affecting later decision-making. This study investigates how listeners use social cues in real-time by measuring the cues' influence on the earliest stages of speech perception. This is critical to our understanding of the role of social information during speech perception and will further develop our models of human language processing. Additionally, a more robust understanding of how social and acoustic cues interact may lead to the development of targeted therapies for certain types of language disorders.Previous work has demonstrated that social cues can directly shift categorization behavior, but the paradigms used in the majority of this work do not allow conclusions to be drawn about the specific time-course of social and acoustic cue integration. The specific time-course of this process is critical to debates over the nature of linguistic representation (episodic vs. abstract) and processing (feed-forward vs. interactive models). This study investigates the following questions: whether social cues can influence on-line perception as detected via eye-tracking during (a) a Ganong task and (b) a compensation for coarticulation task, and (c) whether social cues can induce selective adaptation effects in perception. The data from these experiments will directly address questions of the time-course of speech perception and inform debates over the representations and structures of models of speech perception.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.