Doctoral Dissertation Research: Experimental priming of phonological variant choices

博士论文研究：语音变体选择的实验启动

• 批准号: 2234838
• 负责人: Meredith Tamminga
• 金额: $ 1.81万
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-02-15 至 2025-01-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2234838&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Experimental; priming

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.

语言是高度可变的，因此单词可以具有不同的发音。例如，在美国英语中，步行一词可以发音为步行或更随意的步行。在人们选择哪种选择的许多社会和语言因素中，人们倾向于重复与最近使用或听到的相同发音。例如，一位说话或听到works的英语说话者更有可能在片刻之后说话，即使在另一个单词上，也重复使用休闲的发音。在这个博士学位论文项目中，研究人员使用实验室语音感知和生产实验来询问人类认知的基本特性如何在现实世界中使用这种重复性。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处理日常语言中普遍存在的社会友善的可变性，以确定典型和非典型的语言使用模式在临床环境中，并通常为我们在语言上所涉及的多元化效果而对人类跨性别的流程进行的科学和文化理解，从而对我们的科学和文化做出贡献。处理特定语言形式的地方使得再次产生相同的形式变得更加容易。本论文通过英语单词在感知和生产中的启动变量发音提供了实验证据，这些单词的结束在-ING和-IN -IN之间交替，将来自受控实验室实验的数据与非正式对话语音的数据联系起来，以了解社会化语言变异的感知和产生。将进行一系列实验室实验，以表明可以在感知中引发可变发音，并研究如何在各种情况下削弱或增强这些启动效应。为了更紧密地与大型对话语音数据中的变异持久性的效果联系起来，拟议的实验还研究了个人在语音生产中选择的可变发音的启动。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的知识分子和更广泛影响的评估来通过评估来获得支持的。