Cross linguistic studies on spoken language processing

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目的长期目标是了解语言环境中的口语处理（特别是语音感知和听觉单词识别）。 语音信号具有高度的熟悉性，在人类的经验中具有独特性，在日常生活中具有重要的现实意义。 因此，发现人们开发出专门针对语音的优化处理策略并不令人惊讶（参见。Werker & Tees，1984; Kuhl等人，1992年）。在这个项目中，我们研究如何调整过程可能是敏感的语言结构。 在拟议的工作中解决了两个关键问题。 (1)语言经验改变了言语感知机制中的什么？以及（2）如何对语言/语音信息进行编码以用于语音处理？ 这些问题将在针对四个具体目标的九项研究中加以解决。(1)区分语言特定的知觉处理和语言通用的听觉敏感性。(2)确定特定语言的语音处理是否与词典绑定。(3)检验语音/知觉知识是面向处理不同的语音特征的说法。(4)用言语感知的外显理论模拟实验结果。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term objective of this project is to understand spoken language processing (particularly speech perception and auditory word recognition) in linguistic context. Speech signals are unique in human experience because they are highly familiar, and have great practical significance in daily life. Therefore, it is not too surprising to find that people develop optimized processing strategies tuned specifically for speech (cf. Werker & Tees, 1984; Kuhl et al., 1992). In this project, we study how this tuning process may be sensitive to linguistic structure. Two key questions are addressed in the proposed work. (1) What in the speech perception mechanism is altered by linguistic experience? and (2) how is linguistic/phonetic information encoded for speech processing? These questions will be addressed in a set of nine studies that address four specific aims. (1) Distinguish between language-specific perceptual processing and language-universal auditory sensitivity for speech sounds. (2) Determine whether language-specific speech processing is tied to the lexicon. (3) Test the claim that phonetic/perceptual knowledge is oriented toward handling distinctive phonological features. (4) Model the experimental results in an explicit theory of speech perception.