CAREER: Representations of phonetic reduction and dialect variation in speech production and perception

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Human speech is inherently highly variable: no two utterances of the same word produced by the same talker are acoustically identical. The sources of this variability include properties of individual words, such as how often they occur in spoken language; properties of the context in which a word is uttered, such as the predictability of a word given the previous word; properties of the conversational setting, such as formality; and properties of the talker, such as gender or regional background. Most previous research in this area has focused on one or two sources of variation at a time. However, recent advances in statistical analysis make possible the examination in this study of many variables simultaneously. The two specific hypotheses that will be tested are that the variation due to linguistic and social factors is highly systematic and that this systematicity can facilitate speech processing. Thus, the first goal of this project is to determine how much of the variability in speech can be accounted for by these kinds of linguistic and social factors. To achieve this goal, speech produced by native speakers of American English will be recorded and analyzed in a series of production experiments that manipulate different combinations of these sources of variability. The second goal of the project is to determine how these sources of variability affect the perception and representation of the linguistic and social information that is carried by speech. To achieve this goal, word recognition, word processing, and dialect identification tasks using the recordings collected in the production experiments will be conducted. In addition to substantially contributing to our understanding of variation in speech production and perception, the results of this project have the potential to inform research on language acquisition, language processing in autism spectrum disorders, and speech technology, including automatic speech recognition.