Language provides speakers with the ability to encode the same message in different ways, so a critical question is what drives the decisions speakers make during linguistic encoding? The current view of the language production system argues that speakers prefer to encode their message based on what is easiest, based on evidence that speakers are sensitive to and prefer more easily produced forms over alternatives. However, what is easy for a speaker to produce is not always easy for a listener to comprehend. An open question is to what extent speaker decisions might also reflect a bias for forms that facilitate communication. Recent findings suggest that speakers modulate their productions based on changes to contextual confusability, something not predicted by the view that speakers ignore the intelligibility of their productions. Tested here is an alternative accoun that argues speakers balance production ease with the goal of robust communication and do so by learning from perceived successes and failures at conveying their intended message to listeners. This proposal seeks to test if the aforementioned contextually driven speech changes do facilitate communication using a novel simulated-communication paradigm. This proposal further seeks to test a novel prediction of the robust communication account: that speaker decisions change based on the perceived successes and failures of previous attempts at communication. Preliminary evidence supports this prediction and the project proposed here will further test and refine this account of speaker behavior. The completion of this proposal will lead to insights on if and how the speech production system is organized to achieve communicative goals by adapting to past successes and failures.
This project aims to test if the human language production system balances the difficulty of speaking with the expectation of being understood by changing future productions based on past experience. By testing the extent to which the adult language production system is adaptive, this project seeks to advance our understanding of the language production system as a whole as well as the view that speech production is an adaptive system that achieves communicative goals by learning from past experiences.
| Buz, Esteban; Tanenhaus, Michael K; Jaeger, T Florian (2016) Dynamically adapted context-specific hyper-articulation: Feedback from interlocutors affects speakers' subsequent pronunciations. J Mem Lang 89:68-86 |
| Seyfarth, Scott; Buz, Esteban; Jaeger, T Florian (2016) Dynamic hyperarticulation of coda voicing contrasts. J Acoust Soc Am 139:EL31-7 |
| Buz, Esteban; Jaeger, T Florian (2016) The (in)dependence of articulation and lexical planning during isolated word production. Lang Cogn Neurosci 31:404-424 |
