March 6, 2013

Guest Speaker: Philip J. Monahan (March 7/2013)

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.

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