Phonetic Perceptual Reference Space for Prosodic Phonological Categories

该项目的研究计划是位于音韵学和语音学之间的接口。它的主要目标是定义韵律类别的感知参考空间。实现这一目标的方法是实验和计算。在实验工作中，经典的范式，如类别知觉和知觉磁铁效应被用来确定哪些韵律类别的语音理论假设有一个独特的代表性的知觉语音参考空间。我们正在开发的计算模型用于制定假设并预测测试结果。该模型的核心要素是语境的概念，它包括直接的语音段语境、韵律语境、局部语言语境、语篇语境、情景语境以及说话人特定的信息。假设收听者在从语音输入提取抽象类别时考虑各种类型的上下文信息。该模型进一步假定，收听者用上下文信息来丰富未指定的类别，以在内部合成相关类别的范例，然后在内部合成的范例与语音输入中可用的范例之间进行比较。假设在感知参考空间中执行比较。范例理论作为该项目的实验和计算方面的共同框架。

The research program of the proposed project is situated at the interface between phonology and phonetics. Its principal goal is to define the perceptual reference space for prosodic categories. The methodology applied towards this goal is both experimental and computational. In the experimental work classical paradigms such as Categorical Perception and the Perceptual Magnet Effect are applied to determine which prosodic categories posited by phonological theory have a distinctive representation in the perceptual phonetic reference space. The computational model that we are devoloping serves to formulate hypotheses and make predictions of test results. The key ingredient of the model is the concept of context, which comprises the immediate segmental-phonetic context, prosodic context, local linguistic context, discourse context, and situative context, as well as speaker-specific information. It is assumed that the listener takes various types of context information into account when extracting abstract categories from the speech input. The model further posits that the listener enriches the underspecified categories with the context information to synthesize internally exemplars of the pertinent categories, and then performs a comparison between the internally synthesized exemplars and those available in the speech input. The comparison is assumed to be performed in the perceptual reference space. Exemplar Theory serves as a common framework for the experimental and computational aspects of the project.