Descripción del proyecto
Planificación de la articulación del lenguaje hablado
Existen algunas preguntas antiguas sobre los fundamentos básicos del habla humana. Las principales cuestiones por resolver están relacionadas con la naturaleza de la representación mental de los sonidos del habla, los objetivos del movimiento y los procesos de planificación y producción de la articulación del habla. El equipo del proyecto financiado con fondos europeos PlanArt emprenderá un intento sistemático pionero para determinar qué supuestos teóricos de estos componentes se necesitan para tener debidamente en cuenta el comportamiento de producción del habla de los seres humanos. Se probarán predicciones de alternativas teóricas a través de experimentos innovadores y se compararán modelos computacionales sobre supuestos teóricos básicos. Además, se desarrollará una plataforma flexible que permita aplicar y probar en paralelo supuestos teóricos contrapuestos.
Objetivo
I address major controversies relating to the basic underpinnings of the human speech production system. These concern a) the nature of the mental representations of speech sounds (symbolic vs. spatiotemporal; phonemic vs. non-phonemic gestural), b) the goals of movement (articulatory vs. explicitly acoustic; with emergent vs. explicit surface durations), and c) the processes for planning and generating speech articulations (oscillator-based mechanisms vs. Optimal Control Theory and Lee’s Tau theory). PlanArt will offer the first systematic attempt to determine which theoretical assumptions about each of these three fundamental components are required to provide an adequate account of human speech production behaviour. This ambitious task requires a cutting-edge two-pronged approach. First, through novel experiments I will test predictions of theoretical alternatives for types of phonological representations, output goals, and planning processes. Many of these experiments are inspired by theory and techniques in the non-speech motor literature, which are new to the field of speech production. In the second prong of my research, I will provide a comparison of the articulatory outputs of computational models based on particular sets of core theoretical assumptions. This second, modelling prong will include the development of a flexible, modular platform allowing for parallel implementation, testing, and comparison of competing theoretical assumptions in terms of model outputs, as well as the development of a computational implementation of a new approach, proposed by team members Turk & Shattuck-Hufnagel (2020a) to address shortcomings in the literature. Taken together, this work will provide converging evidence for the nature of the bedrock elements and processes of speech production and will deliver answers to longstanding questions in phonology and phonetics about the way we plan the pronunciations of words in different contexts.
Ámbito científico
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Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantInstitución de acogida
EH8 9YL Edinburgh
Reino Unido