Doctoral Dissertation Research: Experimental priming of phonological variant choices

语言是高度可变的，因此单词可以有不同的发音。例如，在美式英语中，WALKING这个词既可以读作walking，也可以读作更随意的walkin。在许多社会和语言因素影响人们的选择中，众所周知，人们倾向于重复他们最近使用或听到的相同发音。例如，一个说英语的人刚说或听到workin'，过一会儿就更有可能说playin'，甚至在不同的单词上重复使用casual -in'的发音。在这个博士论文项目中，研究人员使用实验室语音感知和产生实验来探讨人类认知的基本特性如何导致现实世界语言使用中的这种重复性。该项目的结果具有长期的潜力，可以帮助提高语言技术的能力，以处理日常语言中普遍存在的具有社会意义的变化，识别临床环境中的典型和非典型语言使用模式，并有助于我们对人类如何在各种语言背景下进行交流的科学和文化理解。变异持续性通常被归因于一种称为启动的认知过程，即处理特定的语言形式使其更容易再次产生相同的形式。本论文通过实验室控制实验的数据和非正式会话的数据，结合词尾在-ing和-in '之间交替变化的英语单词，为启动感知和产出中的可变发音提供了实验证据，以了解社会情境语言变异的感知和产出。本研究将通过一系列实验来证明不同的发音在知觉中可以被启动，并探讨在不同的情况下这些启动效应是如何被削弱或加强的。为了更紧密地结合到以前的工作在大型语料库的会话语音数据的变体持久性，拟议的实验还检查启动的变量发音，个人选择在语音production.This奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得支持的，通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响力审查标准进行评估。

Language is highly variable such that words can have different pronunciations. For instance, in American English, the word WALKING can be pronounced as either walking or the more casual walkin'. Among the many social and linguistic factors shaping which option people choose, it is known that people tend to repeat the same pronunciation that they have recently used or heard. For example, an English speaker who just said or heard workin' becomes more likely to say playin' a few moments later, repeating the use of the casual -in' pronunciation even on a different word. In this doctoral dissertation project, the investigators use laboratory speech perception and production experiments to ask how basic properties of human cognition lead to this kind of repetitiveness in real-world language use. The results of the project have the long-term potential to help improve the capacity of language technology to handle the socially-meaningful variability that is pervasive in everyday language, to identify typical and atypical language use patterns in clinical settings, and generally to contribute to our scientific and cultural understanding of how humans communicate across a diverse range of language backgrounds.The repetitiveness effect described above, known as variant persistence, has often been attributed to a cognitive process called priming, where processing a particular linguistic form makes it easier to produce the same form again. This dissertation provides experimental evidence for priming variable pronunciations in perception and production through English words whose ending alternates between -ing and -in', connecting data from controlled laboratory experiments with data from informal conversational speech in order to understand the perception and production of socially-situated language variation. A series of laboratory experiments will be conducted to show that variable pronunciations can be primed in perception and to investigate how these priming effects may be weakened or strengthened under various circumstances. To tie more closely into previous work on variant persistence in large corpora of conversational speech data, the proposed experiments also examine priming of the variable pronunciations that individuals choose in speech production.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.