Speaker: Philip J. Monahan (Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language)
Title: "Phonology as a Window into Speech Perception: Integrating Brain, Behavior
and Theory"
Time: Thursday, March 7, 2:30 pm
Place: Sid Smith 1086
Abstract:
Despite significant variation in the speech signal, we comprehend spoken
language with little effort. The perceptual and brain mechanisms
responsible for accomplishing this task, however, remain poorly understood.
In this talk, I argue that the internal knowledge of our phonological
system is central in imposing structure on the noisy signal and allows us
to form predictions of what we will hear next. I support this position via
an integration of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience methods and
linguistic theory at different levels of phonological representations:
category, phonotactic, long-distance harmony. First, I present evidence for
a specific auditory scaling mechanism that helps us arrive at normalized
vowel representations and is sensitive to phonological category structure. Second, using behavioral responses and real-time brain measures, I
demonstrate that some aspects of speech sounds are not stored in their
long-term representations, and that these specified representations provide
the basis for predictions of adjacent sounds. Finally, utilizing both
behavioral methods and the temporal precision of EEG, I show that listeners
can use long-distance phonological dependencies as the source for their
predictions and that evidence of these predictions is evident in early
brain responses. Practically, this work demonstrates that theoretical
concepts can be used in conjunction with an array of methods to understand
long-standing questions in speech perception. Moreover, these results
suggest that listeners use their rich phonological knowledge predictively
during online comprehension, pointing toward a class of models that posit
prediction and feedback.
No comments:
Post a Comment