Scharinger Mathias, Idsardi William J
Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany ; Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, USA.
Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, USA.
Lingua. 2014 Feb 1;140:35-51. doi: 10.1016/j.lingua.2013.11.007.
Current models of speech perception tend to emphasize either fine-grained acoustic properties or coarse-grained abstract characteristics of speech sounds. We argue for a particular kind of 'sparse' vowel representations and provide new evidence that these representations account for the successful access of the corresponding categories. In an auditory semantic priming experiment, American English listeners made lexical decisions on targets (e.g. ) preceded by semantically related primes (e.g. ). Changes of the prime vowel that crossed a vowel-category boundary (e.g. ) were not treated as a tolerable variation, as assessed by a lack of priming, although the phonetic categories of the two different vowels considerably overlap in American English. Compared to the outcome of the same experiment with New Zealand English listeners, where such prime variations tolerated, our experiment supports the view that phonological representations are important in guiding the mapping process from the acoustic signal to an abstract mental representation. Our findings are discussed with regard to current models of speech perception and recent findings from brain imaging research.
当前的言语感知模型往往要么强调语音的细粒度声学特性，要么强调语音的粗粒度抽象特征。我们主张一种特定类型的“稀疏”元音表征，并提供新的证据表明这些表征能够解释相应类别的成功识别。在一项听觉语义启动实验中，美国英语听众对在语义相关启动词（例如 ）之后出现的目标词（例如 ）进行词汇判断。尽管在美国英语中，两个不同元音的语音类别有相当大的重叠，但当启动词元音跨越元音类别边界（例如 ）时，根据缺乏启动效应的评估，这种变化不被视为可容忍的变异。与用新西兰英语听众进行的同一实验结果相比，在新西兰英语听众的实验中这种启动词变异是被容忍的，我们的实验支持了这样一种观点，即音系表征在指导从声学信号到抽象心理表征的映射过程中很重要。我们将结合当前的言语感知模型和脑成像研究的最新发现来讨论我们的研究结果。
