Speakers, listeners, languages: Patterns of variability and contrast in spoken language dynamics

我们所提出的项目的目标是阐明语音产生和感知的基本动态是如何由语言特定的语言结构形成的，同时可能会在同一语言社区的个体之间以系统的方式发生变化。人类口语的一个定义性特征是动态的、交织的个体有意义的语音单位（音素）的产生，这些语音单位一起形成单词和句子。虽然我们可以用字母序列来正字法表示音素，但音素在语音产生中的实现并不像串在绳子上的珠子那样随着时间的推移而展开。相反，我们产生这些语音的方式受到它们之前和之后的声音的影响和依赖，这种现象被称为协同发音。协同发音确保快速有效的沟通-它是积极计划的，是学习的一部分，特定语言的扬声器知识。同样在感知中，听者在确定说话者说出了哪些词时，会积极地寻找说话者产出中协同发音的动态线索。虽然人们一再认为，语音对比-即，语音构成语言的一部分-限制了协同发音的程度，这种说法的经验证据仍然是模糊的，因为语言之间的变化并不一定像语音结构所预测的那样。与此同时，同一语言的不同使用者之间的协同发音模式也有很大的差异。最近的研究发现，这种语音对比信号的个体差异可能不仅仅是“噪音”，而是高维的，特定于语言的生产感知动态的一部分，目前还不太清楚。拟议中的项目将使我们能够获得一个全面的看法之间的关系，感知和生产的语音为个人语言用户，在一个规模，这将使我们能够评估个人之间的结构化差异的水平内和语言之间。我们的工作将集中在两个语音对比（鼻音和唇圆），在三种语言（英语，德语，法语），并包括比大多数以前的研究更多的参与者。因此，该项目前所未有的范围有可能在以下方面开辟新的视角：1）语言为什么以及如何彼此不同，2）语言变异的哪些方面对所有人类语言使用者都是普遍的，3）声音系统如何进化，以及4）言语产生和感知之间的认知关系。该项目的另一个好处是向科学界提供了一个全面的跨语言数据库，可用于研究和教学目的。

The goal of our proposed project is to shed new light on how the basic dynamics of speech production and perception are shaped by language-specific linguistic structure and may, at the same time, vary between individuals of the same language community in a systematic fashion. A defining characteristic of human spoken language is the dynamic, interwoven production of individual meaningful speech units (phonemes) which together form words and sentences. Although we may represent phonemes orthographically as sequences of letters, the realization of phonemes in speech production does not unfold in time like beads on a string. Rather, the way that we produce these individual speech sounds is affected by and dependent upon the sounds that precede and follow them in time, a phenomenon known as coarticulation. Coarticulation ensures rapid and effective communication — it is actively planned and is part of learned, language-specific speaker knowledge. Also in perception, listeners actively seek out the dynamic cues of coarticulation in a speaker's production when determining which words were spoken. While it has repeatedly been argued that phonological contrast — i.e., which sounds form part of a language's inventory — constrains the degree of coarticulation, the empirical evidence for this claim has remained ambiguous, since variation between languages does not necessarily pattern as predicted by phonological structure. At the same time, there is substantial variation in coarticulatory patterns among individual speakers of the same language. Recent studies have uncovered that this individual variation in how phonological contrast is signaled may be not just ‘noise’ but instead be part of a high-dimensional, language-specific production-perception dynamic which is currently little understood. The proposed project will enable us obtain a comprehensive view on the relation between perceived and produced speech for individual language users, at a scale that will allow us to assess levels of structured variability among individuals both within and between languages. Our work will focus on two phonological contrasts (nasality and lip rounding), in three languages (English, German, French), and include a larger number of participants than most previous studies. The project's unprecedented scope has therefore the potential to open new perspectives on 1) why and how languages differ from each other, 2) what aspects of language variation are universal to all human language users, 3) how sound systems evolve, and 4) the cognitive relationship between speech production and perception. The further benefit of the project lies in making available to the scientific community a comprehensive cross-linguistic database that can be used for research and teaching purposes.