Carol A. Fowler - US grants

Our goals are to understand the phonological component of language, biologically specialized for speaking and listening, serves those functions and adapts to reading and writing. Projects I and II offer complementary foci on speaking and listening. Project I investigates the public phonological activities of speaker/listeners. We test our unique claim that phonetic gestures are the elemental components of words, of speech plans, ov focal tract actions, and of speech percepts.. Project II explores brain mechanisms that support speaking and listening. Project I investigates the public phonological activities of speaker/listeners. We test our unique claim that phonetic gestures are the elemental components of words, of speech plans, of vocal tract actions, and of speech percepts. Project II explores brain mechanisms that support speaking and listening. Two goals are to test claims of our motor theory.: that perception is achieved by a phonetic module and that the module recruits control structures for production in perceptual processing. Project III addresses the remarkable fact that, although humans evolved to speak and listen, they can access phonological forms efficiently from print, speaking faces, pictures, and sign language. Project III explores, compares and contrasts these routes to the phonology. Project IV-VI focus on reading. The link from speech to reading is this. Skill reading requires rapid and reliable access to phonological information from print. To learn to read, children must develop "phoneme awareness," an appreciation that spoken words are composed of the for language early in processing print; reading is parasitic on speech. In Project IV, we use fMRI, behavioral tests and simulations to explore brain systems that underlie beginning and skilled word recognition. Project V explores the different pathways by which the alphabetic principle can be learned and how beginning readers develop skill. We investigate awareness and decoding and we study the shift from unskilled decoding to fluency (presumably as the ventral route develops). Project VI investigates skilled word recognition in a variety of orthographies. Studies test the phonological coherence hypothesis that phonological representations achieve resolution faster, and reach states of greater stability than other representations and so provide the earliest and the primary influence on lexical dynamics. We also test an emergent morphology hypothesis that morphological representations arise from, and then constrain, the dynamics of orthographic, phonological and semantic activations. We expect our research to contribute substantially to our understanding of the phonological basis of spoken language and the role of the phonology in language use by ear and by eye.

biomedical equipment purchase;

speech recognition; speech; reading; psycholinguistics; biomedical facility; behavioral /social science research tag; clinical research; human subject;

A major aim of this project is to continue development of our theoretical perspective on speech, according to which phonetic gestures of the vocal tract are at once the fundamental units of the phonology, the smallest units of speech production and the smallest perceivable units of a speech message. A theory of speech perception that is constrained to be compatible with theories of phonology and of speech production, has, we argue, a stronger claim to realism than ones developed unconstrained in these ways. In the first section of the proposal, we propose research on speech production and perception designed to develop Browman and Goldstein's theory of articulatory phonology along two major lines. First, we test a proposal in the theory that gestural, not featural, units serve as units of contrast in languages. Second, we focus on principles by which gestures are relatively timed to form syllables of the language. In a second section of the proposal, we address a major challenge to our view that athe phonetic gestures of articulatory phonology are perceived that takes the form of evidence interpreted as showing that speakers do not attempt to achieve articulatory targets, but rather, acoustic ones. If that is the case, then there is no justification to our proposal that listeners hear gestural targets. In a third section, we propose experiments to test directly our view that gestures, not acoustically-defined phonetic information, is extracted from the acoustic speech signal by listeners. A final section proposes to use behavioral measures and fMRI measures of brain activity to test a claim of the motor theory that gestural perception is achieved by a specialized phonetic module int he human brain.

DESCRIPTION: The parent project is part of a large NIH-supported program project with six sections, designed to determine the relationship between speech and reading, and to understand the basis of the reading problems suffered by some children. In the present program of research large numbers of Russian school children and their caregivers will be tested in order to determine the characteristics of Russian dyslexia and to understand the problems of disfluent reading in English and other languages. The primary intent is to understand better the transition from beginning to skilled reading using the Russian writing system which, because of its consistency, is better suited for this purpose than English. A secondary purpose is to test hypothesis about the relation between reading ability and a persons ability to analyze speech into its building blocks (phonemes). A third aim is to assess causal models that relate a child's early language and literacy experience to reading ability. The foreign collaborator will test Russian school children (3rd and 4th grades) and their primary caregivers on a large battery of tests designed to assess reading performance, spoken language functioning, and aspect of brain laterality, and literacy experience. All of the test produces have been used successfully previously with American subjects and the majority of these have also been piloted successfully with Russian children. The test procedures include measures of child's accuracy and fluency in reading. Also, measures of spoken-language functioning will be obtained. Finally, caregivers will be tested on measures similar to the children and will also provide histories of the child's early language and literacy experience. The advantage of extending the procedures planned for US children to those of other countries is that the relationships between the written alphabet and speech sounds are many and varied in English and it is then possible to determine how this complicates learning to read in US children.

The overall aim of our research is to use the demonstrated tendency for adults to imitate the speech they hear as a tool to explore the nature of speech perception. In initial studies, we explore the nature of objects of speech perception (i.e., acoustic or articulatory), a topic that is much debated in the field of speech research. The question is of interest in its own right as an important topic for basic research. It also has implications for application, for example, for the design of successful speech recognition devices. We intend to confirm and then exploit the tendency that humans appear to have to imitate the speech of others. We also propose to explore what is imitated when imitations occur. If our initial findings suggest that perceptual objects are acoustic or auditory, then we will ask whether imitations are of surface acoustic forms or of more abstract normalized forms. If initial findings suggest articulatory perceptual objects, then we will ask whether surface articulations or linguistic gestures are imitated. We also propose to explore the kinds of factors (especially varieties of language learning) that influence both imitation facility and fidelity. An important research tool for our project is the electromagnetic articulometer (EMMA) that will allow us to track the gestures of our subjects and relate them to those of the speech that they shadow. However, other techniques involving acoustic measurement, perceptual judgments or both will also be used to assess imitative fidelity. We expect our research to contribute usefully to the debate about perceptual objects, and, therefore to advances in both basic and applied research.

Our aim in Project I is to develop our theoretical perspective on the "practical phonology", that is, on phonological structures of public language use. The research complements work on neurobiological foundations on speech in Project II and will inform on reading about the fundamental elements of the spoken language that readers access. A central requirement of phonological language is that communicators typically achieve "parity," a relation of sufficient equivalence between messages sent and received. Without this requirement, language use would not serve to communicate. Because language is an evolved system, parity achievement will have been selected for, and therefore, phonological systems will foster achievement of parity. A parity fostering system is one in which components of the language that serve to make a speaker's message public, that is, phonological elements, are themselves public things. In addition, they are elements of the message through all phases of an exchange; they are elements of the phonological message as planned by the speaker, as implemented in the vocal tract and as perceived. We propose that gestures (linguistically significant actions of the vocal tract) are the phonological primitives that are preserved in every phase of a spoken communicative event. Our research is designed to test and further develop these ideas. We propose to develop our theory of phonological competence, Articulatory Phonology, by showing that it can insightfully address the kinds of phonological systematicities that serve as test cases for phonological theories. Next we show that the primaries of Articulatory Phonology, gestures, are also units of encoding in utterance planning and production. Third, we attempt to show that gestures are the primitive of perceived phonological structure. Our final lines of research address two central functions of phonological structures in a practical phonology. One is lexical specification; phonological elements must uniquely identify words, distinguishing them from others. We propose to determine how phonological structure interacts with lexical knowledge in speech perception. The second function is social identification. People mark their social affiliations by their particular phonetic implementations of phonological structures. We propose to study "gestural drift", the drift of speakers toward the gestural dialect of the ambient speech community.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our plan is to train eight post-doctoral fellows to be highly qualified and productive reading researchers. Two fellows will be accepted for two-year positions in each of the first four years of the program. Participants will have doctoral degrees in education, psychology, linguistics, speech science or other related fields. They will receive training in one or more of the many areas of reading research pursued at Haskins Laboratories, including reading development, skilled reading, reading disorders, reading comprehension, brain processing involved in reading, cross-language studies and professional development of teachers. A common emphasis to the reading research endeavors at the Laboratories is the focus on the phonological demands of reading and how they influence other components of reading. Post doctoral fellows will be carefully mentored and given a range of experiences to foster their own expertise. Initially, they will collaborate on research with members of the scientific staff and will later undertake independent research projects. Publication of research and participation in national conferences will be expected. The fellows will attend, and later sometimes lead, monthly proseminar meetings in which participants discuss current topics in reading research. They will also attend weekly colloquia at Haskins Laboratories and periodic seminars on topics relating to the ethical conduct of research, grant writing and writing articles for professional journals. They will have the opportunity to take courses at Yale University, University of Connecticut, or University of Rhode Island. The primary site for training is Haskins Laboratories. The Laboratories have extensive computer resources and laboratory facilities for conducting research. However, we anticipate that much of the research conducted by the postdoctoral fellows will take place off site either in local elementary and middle schools or at universities where participant pools are available.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Despite the idealization of much linguistic analysis, speakers of the same language speak alike only roughly. There is dialectal and idiolectal variation, stylistic variation, rate variation and more. Recent linguistic and psycholinguistic research shows clearly that this variation is not treated as noise by listener/speakers. In this research proposal, we are interested in one use that variation in talk can serve: It permits language users to sound more and less like one another. That is, it permits imitation, where imitation serves a useful role, for example, to mark group affiliation or cooperatively. We have five specific aims, all relating to linguistic variation and imitation. First, we propose to test whether imitation occurs in cooperative joint activities but not in less cooperative, more competitive, settings. Second, we propose to look at effects of imitation over the longer term of language change, that is periods spanning months and periods spanning years. Our third aim is to test the role of familiarity on perception and imitation of speech in other languages and dialects. Earlier research has shown that imitation is shaped by relevant exemplar memories (Goldinger, 1998). Accordingly, the familiarity of an utterance affects its identifiably, for example. Our fourth aim is to find evidence for or against one possible mechanism underlying imitation: the motor-perception link proposed as the motor theory of speech perception (e.g., Liberman & Mattingly, 1985). Finally, our fifth aim is to develop both computational and behavioral models of the roles of variability and imitation in speech production development, in development of phonological inventories, and in development of language itself.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Project Summary: Our long-term goal is to understand how humans organize their brains and vocal tracts so that they can speak; only through understanding normal function can we see what happens with disorders. Although it is uncontroversial that most of the speech we hear is produced by a human vocal tract, it is less accepted that speech production and speech perception are intricately linked. Many theorists hold that the vocal tract's acoustic output is dealt with in a purely acoustic manner and that the link would be seen in modifications of the vocal tract shape to achieve particular acoustics. An alternative approach holds that speech consists of gestures (the coordinated activity of articulators), such as the jaw and the lips, achieving a phonetic goal, such as lip closure. The gestural model has allowed an insightful interpretation of many speech production phenomena, and the models have begun to have testable predictions for perceptual theories as well. The proposed experiments expand on this research, showing how perception of gestures is possible in automatic speech recognition, how the consequences of articulation - acoustic, visual and even haptic - are used by perceivers, and how accommodations are made for differences between speakers. This theoretical outlook has been fruitfully applied to problems in language acquisition, language change, and certain language disabilities. The advances from the proposed research should allow even broader applications. The goal is to show how acoustic parameters that cohere because of their origin in articulation are used by listeners. This will be accomplished by acoustical modeling of natural productions, perception of natural speech under modified circumstances (e.g., impaired by noise or enhanced by feeling the articulators saying what is being heard), and measurement of speech with ultrasound and optical markers. These measurements provide a basis for input to our configurable articulatory synthesizer, which can match the size and acoustic output of individual speakers. Stimuli generated from this synthesizer can test hypotheses about what is important in the production patterns we see. The results of these experiments will show more clearly than ever the tight link between production and perception of speech. Relevance: Speech is the primary means most humans use to communicate and maintain social relationships, but it is vulnerable to a range of disorders. We have to understand how it is that speech works normally so we can know what to do when things go wrong. Research along the lines in the present project has already contributed to other grants dealing with such disorders as Parkinson's disease and autism. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

Accounting; Achievement; Achievement Attainment; Address; Affect; Auditory; Bears; Brain; Categories; Cereals; Competence; Computers; Development and Research; Ear; Ear structure; Elements; Encephalon; Encephalons; Eye; Eyeball; Fostering; Gestures; Grain; Hearing; Investigators; Laboratories; Language; Learning; Linguistic; Linguistics; Literature; Masks; Method LOINC Axis 6; Methodology; Modality; Nervous System, Brain; Perception; Personal Satisfaction; Phase; Phonetics; Play; Printing; Process; Production; Programs (PT); Programs [Publication Type]; Property; Property, LOINC Axis 2; Psyche structure; R &D; R&D; Reader; Reading; Research; Research Personnel; Researchers; Role; Speech; Speech Perception; Stimulus; Structure; System; System, LOINC Axis 4; Testing; Time; Ursidae; Ursidae Family; Visual; Writing; abstracting; design; designing; experiment; experimental research; experimental study; hearing perception; luminance; mental; parity; phonological; phonology; programs; research and development; research study; social role; sound perception; tachistoscope; theories; tool; well-being

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The postdoctoral program in reading acquisition and reading disabilities at Haskins Laboratories will provide research training, a supportive research environment, and opportunities for advanced coursework at affiliated universities. The range of research opportunities, the nature of the research involvement, and the choice of coursework (if any) will be tailored for each fellow. On entry into the program, fellows will establish an informal advisory committee that will provide guidance and support for the fellow's research plans and course of study. Fellows may initially choose to participate in an ongoing research project at the Laboratories; however, they may instead undertake their own project. Postdoctoral fellows will be encouraged to attend the regular research colloquia at Haskins that take place nearly every week. The lectures feature speakers from around the world as well as researchers on the staff at Haskins. In the past, a broad array of topics on language and literacy has been addressed in the colloquia including neuropsychological and genetic studies of reading, intervention research, studies of speech perception and production, investigations of syntactic development, and much more. Although taking courses is not the central aim of the postdoctoral training, individuals may wish to broaden or deepen their expertise in specific areas relevant to their research and professional goals. Course options are available at Yale University, University of Connecticut and University of Rhode Island. The duration of the training will be two years, and we expect to accept two post doctoral fellows into the program in each of four years. Relevance: the abilities to read and write are critical to individuals' chances for success in our society. We are bringing to bear findings of scientifically based reading research to class room instruction. Our plan is to train scientists to assist in this goal by enhancing relevant scientific knowledge and by helping to implement the knowledge in the classroom. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

It has been estimated that five to nine percent of school-aged children are diagnosed with dyslexia, and even adult skilled readers can experience debilitating reading impairments as a result of brain injury or disease. Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the perceptual or cognitive dysfunctions that may underlie dyslexia, but one that has been particularly influential over the past thirty years or so is the phonological deficit hypothesis. This hypothesis states that reading deficits can often be linked to underlying problems in the way that the sound system of a reader's language is represented and processed in the brain. However, new evidence from genetics and brain imaging has come to light in recent years, and new phonological theories have been developed. With support of the National Science Foundation, a satellite conference will be held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading to critically examine the phonological deficit hypothesis in light of new theory and evidence. An international group of leaders in the field will discuss whether the hypothesis has stood the test of time, and how it might change as research continues to advance our understanding of reading deficits.

We have designed a longitudinal study to examine reading (in typically developing and reading disabled children) at critical points during its acquisition in readers learning writing systems that vary in orthographic depth: Finnish, English, and Mandarin Chinese. Our previous cross sectional research in English has identified age- and ability-related differences in both neurobiological and behavioral trajectories;the proposed longitudinal study is aimed at gaining a better understanding of the neurocognitive factors responsible for the observed divergences in the reading skills of normally developing and reading disabled cohorts, and to examine the influence of writing system on these divergences. To that end, we will monitor development during children's initial acquisition of the code (ages 5 to 8 years) and during the attainment of fluency by intermediate level readers (ages 8 to 11 years). Developing proficiency in each longitudinal sample will be assessed with common psychometric, adaptive learning, and neurobiological (ERP and fMRI) measures so that relationships among attained skills, cognitive processing, and cortical organization can be tracked.