脳科学への期待(<特集>音声と脳科学)

概要

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A layman's view about the brain science approach to speech was presented. The most obvious advantage of the brain science approach over the traditional behavioral approach consists in the possible clarification of speech encoding and decoding processes; the processes that remain largely untouched in the behavioral approach. Especially, construction of computational model of speech perception will open up a brand-new landscape of speech science. However, to achieve these goals effectively, brain science should pay more attention to the fruits obtained by the behavior approach. Experiments of brain science should be designed based upon sufficient understanding of the linguistic properties of experimental stimuli. It is especially important to pay enough attention for the probabilistic properties of linguistic signs. For example, the distinction between semantically normal and abnormal stimuli is not necessarily a dichotomy. It is possible to compute the occurrence probability of semantically deviant sentences using the power of powerful computer and large-scale annotated language corpora. In the same vein, retrieval of a speech corpus reveals that the long-believed distributional restriction of the /tyu/ mora in Japanese is not a strict one as long as spontaneous speech is concerned. Results of brain scientific experiments will enrich greatly our understanding of speech, if the experiments are designed correctly.
日本音声学会の論文
2004-12-31