Formation and tuning of complex auditory categories

该项目是了解一般听觉的合作研究计划的延续。 分类，因为它与言语感知有关。语言学习者形成(语音)听觉范畴 由许多说话者产生的有经验的语音的分布所产生的母语声音。 然而，这些平均类别可能与特定说话者产生的语音无关。为 例如，非母语人士的讲话可能不符合母语人士的正常模式。该项目 该应用程序中描述的检查了人类将听觉类别“调整”到 特定的听力状况。来自非英语母语和母语为英语的人的演讲将被分析为 确定可能影响知觉的声音分布的差异。这些作品将是 作为分类任务的前兆呈现给听众(有时以经过处理的形式)。学位 其中语音分类受到说话者特定信息的影响，将被确定。二 我们将研究这种能力背后的可能机制。在一组实验中，语音声音将 前面有非言语的前兆。这些前体保留了一些声学结构 语音前置句，但无语言/语音内容。的分类发生了变化 语音将表明，听觉系统将类别调整为 周围的环境听起来像是。在另一系列实验中，听者将被训练来分类 复杂的非语音声音的分布。训练结束后，分布规律会发生变化。一种能力 跟踪这些变化并保持最佳性能的监听者的数量将被考察。结果将会是 指出听者对声音类别分布特征变化的敏感度。已被占用 总而言之，这些实验将提供对听众适应干扰的能力的洞察 正常的母语语音产生，更广泛地说，为听觉分类理论提供了信息。

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 categoriesof 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 characteristicsof 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.