Formation and tuning of complex auditory categories

描述(由申请人提供)：这个项目是一个合作研究项目的继续，以了解一般的听觉分类，因为它与语音感知有关。语言学习者从许多说话者产生的有经验的语音的分布中形成母语声音的(语音)听觉类别。然而，这些平均类别可能与特定说话者产生的语音无关。例如，非母语人士的讲话可能不符合母语人士的正常模式。本申请中描述的项目考察了人类根据特定收听情况的特点来“调整”听觉类别的能力。非英语母语者和英语母语者的语音将被分析，以确定可能影响感知的声音分布的差异。这些作品将被呈现给听众(有时是被操纵的形式)，作为分类任务的前身。语音分类受说话者特定信息影响的程度将被确定。我们将考察这种能力背后的两种可能的机制。在一组实验中，语音的前缀是非语音前兆。这些前体保留了语音前体句子的一些声学结构，但没有保留语言/语音内容。语音分类的变化将表明，听觉系统根据周围环境声音的声学组成来调整分类。在另一系列实验中，听者将被训练对复杂的非语音声音的分布进行分类。训练结束后，分布规律会发生变化。我们将考察监听者跟踪这些变化并保持最佳性能的能力。结果将表明听者对声音类别分布特征变化的敏感度。综上所述，这些实验将提供对听者适应正常母语语音产生的干扰的能力的洞察，更广泛地说，将为听觉分类理论提供信息。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project is a continuation of a collaborative research program to understand general auditory categorization as it relates to speech perception. Language learners form (phonetic) auditory categories of native-language sounds from the distributions of experienced speech sounds produced by many talkers. However, these averaged categories may not be relevant to the speech produced by a specific talker. For example, non-native speech may not adhere to the normal patterns of native speakers. The project described in this application examines the ability of humans to "tune" auditory categories to characteristics of the particular listening situation. Speech from non-native and native speakers of English will be analyzed to determine differences in the distributions of sounds that may affect perception. These productions will be presented to listeners (sometimes in manipulated forms) as precursors to a categorization task. The degree to which speech sound categorization is affected by talker-specific information will be ascertained. Two possible mechanisms underlying this ability will be examined. In one set of experiments, speech sounds will be preceded by non-speech precursors. These precursors retain some of the acoustic structure of the speech precursor sentences but none of the linguistic/phonetic content. Shifts in the categorization of the speech sounds will indictate that the auditory system tunes categories to the acoustic makeup of the surrounding context sounds. In another series of experiments, listeners will be trained to categorize distributions of complex non-speech sounds. After training, distributions regularities will change. The ability of listeners to track these changes and maintain optimal performance will be examined. The results will indicate the sensitivity of listeners to changes in the distributional characteristics of sound categories. Taken together, these experiments will provide insight into the ability of listeners to accommodate perturbations of normal native speech productions and, more generally, inform theories of auditory categorization.