Doctoral Dissertation Research: When is Phonetic Variation Helpful for Word Learning?

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

When we listen to someone speaking sentences in our language, each word seems as clearly identifiable as a familiar face in a crowd. But in fact, each time we hear a particular word spoken, it is acoustically different from the last time we heard it spoken. Different talkers, different rates of speech, and different emotional states all affect the specific acoustic form that a word takes. Experienced language users have no trouble overcoming this variability in the acoustic manifestation of words, but people who are still learning the language - young children and second language learners - struggle. Thus, uniquely identifying particular words from a highly variable acoustic signal is a skill that must be mastered through experience for each language learned. The main goal of this research is to explore one factor that might contribute to that mastery. A secondary question is how words are represented in the mind so as to allow both rapid identification from the acoustic signal and rapid production. Understanding when input from multiple talkers is helpful for learning new words will address the broader question of how people learn to perceive and produce words, a crucial task in learning a first or second language. Additionally, the way that speech perception and production are related has been a long-standing issue in phonetics as well as in language development. There is usually agreement that the knowledge about how to perceive a word influences knowledge about how to produce that word. However, there is much disagreement as to whether there is a single representation that is used for both perceiving a word and producing a word, or whether there are two different, but related representations. If there is a difference between perception and production in terms of benefit from multiple talkers, we will have evidence for different representations for perception and production, at least when a word is newly learned. A more nuanced understanding of the benefit of multiple talkers may inform methods for second language learning. More broadly, it may also shed light on how language is represented in the human mind.