You came TO DIE?! Perceptual adaptation to regional accents as a new lens on the puzzle of spoken word recognition. Investigating Australian, New Zealand and UK listeners adaptation to each others accents will reveal how we achieve stable word recognition via flexible adjustment to pronunciation differences. Results will inform word recognition theory and illuminate why unfamiliar accents are difficult for language learners and automatic speech recognisers.
Explaining the native-language listening advantage by charting neural response and perceptual adaptation across languages – but within individuals. Listening to the native language is easier than listening to a second language. This advantage is especially clear in recognising voices and in listening in noise. Identifying talkers was recently shown to involve rapid perceptual adjustment to their speech sounds, and successful listening in noise to involve adjustment of word recognition processes. ....Explaining the native-language listening advantage by charting neural response and perceptual adaptation across languages – but within individuals. Listening to the native language is easier than listening to a second language. This advantage is especially clear in recognising voices and in listening in noise. Identifying talkers was recently shown to involve rapid perceptual adjustment to their speech sounds, and successful listening in noise to involve adjustment of word recognition processes. This project tests the prediction that listeners more efficiently deploy each type of adjustment in the native than in a second language, by comparing native with second language phonetic and lexical processing within individuals. Further, a novel fMRI method in which target brain regions are defined functionally in each subject will identify the neural basis of the native listening advantage.Read moreRead less
Learning to Talk, Talking to Learn: Effects of an early childhood language program in remote Northern Territory indigenous communities. Both the quality and quantity of language children hear, and adult understandings of child development, drive children's future outcomes. Understanding how to improve both is critical to the lifelong education, employment and social potential of children from low socioeconomic families, especially with hearing loss. This project aims to examine to what extent a ....Learning to Talk, Talking to Learn: Effects of an early childhood language program in remote Northern Territory indigenous communities. Both the quality and quantity of language children hear, and adult understandings of child development, drive children's future outcomes. Understanding how to improve both is critical to the lifelong education, employment and social potential of children from low socioeconomic families, especially with hearing loss. This project aims to examine to what extent a parent-implemented early childhood language program designed to buffer against effects of childhood otitis media can support indigenous children in remote northern Australia. Outcomes aim to be data on effects on children's language, attention, and school readiness, plus uptake of strategies and knowledge by parents and other adults, and evidence regarding best practice in such contexts.Read moreRead less
Incremental syntactic parsing and coreference resolution. As computers become smaller, keyboards and screens become increasingly impractical. We'd like to be able to talk to our computers, but they'd have to understand what we say. This project will develop a computational model that tracks which things are talked about and identifies 'who did what to whom' in text or speech.
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE120101289
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$375,000.00
Summary
How we know who is talking: talker-distinctiveness in speech timing. The goal of the project is to understand the cognitive mechanisms that underpin the human ability to recognise both words and talkers in speech. The project will produce a pan-Australian model of speech timing and employ it to predict how easily talkers can recognise each other.
Computational models of synergies in human language acquisition. How do children learn language? Do they first learn to recognise words and then associate words with meanings, or do they use the meanings to figure out what the words are, or do they do both at the same time, and if so, how? This project will investigate questions like these using advanced computational models of the way children learn from their environment.