Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Michigan State University.
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park.
Psychol Sci. 2014 Aug;25(8):1546-53. doi: 10.1177/0956797614533705. Epub 2014 Jun 6.
Humans unconsciously track a wide array of distributional characteristics in their sensory environment. Recent research in spoken-language processing has demonstrated that the speech rate surrounding a target region within an utterance influences which words, and how many words, listeners hear later in that utterance. On the basis of hypotheses that listeners track timing information in speech over long timescales, we investigated the possibility that the perception of words is sensitive to speech rate over such a timescale (e.g., an extended conversation). Results demonstrated that listeners tracked variation in the overall pace of speech over an extended duration (analogous to that of a conversation that listeners might have outside the lab) and that this global speech rate influenced which words listeners reported hearing. The effects of speech rate became stronger over time. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that neural entrainment by speech occurs on multiple timescales, some lasting more than an hour.
人类在感官环境中无意识地跟踪各种分布特征。最近在口语处理方面的研究表明，话语中目标区域周围的语速会影响听众在该话语中稍后听到的单词，以及听到的单词数量。基于听众在长时间内跟踪语音中时间信息的假设，我们研究了在这种时间尺度（例如，长时间的对话）上，单词感知是否对语速敏感的可能性。结果表明，听众在较长时间内跟踪了语音整体节奏的变化（类似于听众在实验室外进行的对话），并且这种整体语速影响了听众报告听到的单词。随着时间的推移，语速的影响变得更强。我们的发现与语音在多个时间尺度上发生神经同步的假设一致，其中一些时间尺度持续一个多小时。
