The primary purpose of this research is to investigate the ability of the adult speech perception system to adapt to foreign accented speech. The effect of experience with accented speech on on-line speech processing will be examined with laboratory training studies. Changes in phonetic category representation and the mechanism of these possible changes will be tested using phoneme categorization, phoneme monitoring, word-spotting, and cross-modal matching tasks. Findings are expected to contribute to a better understanding of the general process of adaptation to variability in speech. This will, in turn, suggest ways to incorporate a mechanism of adaptation into models of spoken word recognition. A secondary goal is to gain experience with automatic speech recognition technology and explore connections between the human and computer fields of speech processing research. Findings in the human perception domain will be applied to the improvement of foreign accented word recognition accuracy for automatic speech recognizers. Reciprocally, computational techniques used in automatic speech recognition will be evaluated for possible application to models of human speech perception. ? ?
