The overall goal of the present grant proposal is to characterize the process by which listeners recognize words in fluent speech. The proposed research examines the nature of the competitor set that is activated during word recognition in contnuous speech, focusing on lexical neighborhoods, sub-phonemic acoustic/phonetic variation and embedded lexical competitors. A novel program of research on perceptual learning will also be initiated. Eye movements will be monitored as participants follow spoken instructions to pick up and move (with a mouse) line drawings of concrete objects on a computer monitor (e.g., """"""""pick up the candy. now put it above the circle"""""""".) These studies will provide the finest grained information to date about the time course of lexical activation in continuous speech. The availability of an explicit linking hypothesis means that these data can be used to compare and contrast models that are explicit enough to generate predicted activations over time for lexical candidates. The proposed research will help bridge the gap between research on spoken word recognition research and research on speech perception and it will provide important new information about the effects of perceptual learning on lexical processing. The results will be important for models of spoken word recognition, and will also inform models of the effects of neurological damage on spoken word recognition and models of lexical development in children. Moreover, because the eye movement paradigm does not rely on meta-linguistic judgments that are difficult for these populations, it can be easily extended to empirical investigations of brain-damaged patients, young children, and infants.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01DC005071-04
Application #
6781050
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1-BBBP-3 (01))
Program Officer
Cooper, Judith
Project Start
2001-08-01
Project End
2006-07-31
Budget Start
2004-08-01
Budget End
2005-07-31
Support Year
4
Fiscal Year
2004
Total Cost
$216,093
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Rochester
Department
Other Basic Sciences
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
041294109
City
Rochester
State
NY
Country
United States
Zip Code
14627
Aslin, Richard N (2014) Phonetic Category Learning and Its Influence on Speech Production. Ecol Psychol 26:4-15
Salverda, Anne Pier; Kleinschmidt, Dave; Tanenhaus, Michael K (2014) Immediate effects of anticipatory coarticulation in spoken-word recognition. J Mem Lang 71:145-163
Kidd, Celeste; White, Katherine S; Aslin, Richard N (2011) Toddlers use speech disfluencies to predict speakers' referential intentions. Dev Sci 14:925-34
White, Katherine S; Aslin, Richard N (2011) Adaptation to novel accents by toddlers. Dev Sci 14:372-84
Salverda, Anne Pier; Brown, Meredith; Tanenhaus, Michael K (2011) A goal-based perspective on eye movements in visual world studies. Acta Psychol (Amst) 137:172-80
Brown, Meredith; Salverda, Anne Pier; Dilley, Laura C et al. (2011) Expectations from preceding prosody influence segmentation in online sentence processing. Psychon Bull Rev 18:1189-96
Salverda, Anne Pier; Altmann, Gerry T M (2011) Attentional capture of objects referred to by spoken language. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 37:1122-33
Salverda, Anne Pier; Tanenhaus, Michael K (2010) Tracking the time course of orthographic information in spoken-word recognition. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 36:1108-17
McMurray, Bob; Tanenhaus, Michael K; Aslin, Richard N (2009) Within-category VOT affects recovery from ""lexical"" garden paths: Evidence against phoneme-level inhibition. J Mem Lang 60:65-91
Clayards, Meghan; Tanenhaus, Michael K; Aslin, Richard N et al. (2008) Perception of speech reflects optimal use of probabilistic speech cues. Cognition 108:804-9

Showing the most recent 10 out of 24 publications