时间：2017年5月31日（周三）10:00
地点：东六-219
题目: Experience and expectation predict fine details of perception and production
摘要:
It is well known that phonemes with otherwise similar phonological behavior may be produced differently (e.g. VOT, (Cho & Ladefoged, 1999)) or perceived differently (e.g. consonant confusions (Harnsberger, 2001)) depending on the language. Discussion of these facts has often remained at the observational level. In this talk I will present evidence that fine details of production and perception owe to the fact that speakers and listeners have statistical expectations about segments and words in their languages. I will draw evidence for this conclusion from a series of production and perception studies, drawing on durational difference between singleton and geminate consonants in Cypriot Greek and Italian, the perceptual similarity of consonants and word duration in Kaqchikel Mayan, and lexical mistrieval in English. These phenomena are all conditioned by high-level factors such as functional load, contextual predictability and prior phonetic experience. I will argue that the underlying mechanism that drives these language-specific details is grounded in language-general communicative principles. Methodologically, I will demonstrate that corpus methods can be robustly extended to psycholinguistic research on under-resourced languages with small, noisy but naturalistic data collected under less than ideal conditions.
主讲人简介:
Dr. Kevin Tang received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from University College London in 2015 under the mentorship of Prof. Andrew Nevins. He also holds an M.Eng. and a B.A. in Engineering from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a postdoctoral associate in the Yale Linguistics department, working with Prof. Ryan Bennett on the phonetics and phonology of Kaqchikel (Mayan). Following the tradition of laboratory phonology, Dr. Tang focuses on experimental phonology with an emphasis on how linguistic contrasts are conditioned by lexical knowledge. Specifically, he examines the extent to which speakers and listeners utilize their prior experiences in speech production and perception as well as in the phonologization of statistical patterns. Some of his work integrates phonological theory with interdisciplinary areas outside of linguistics, such as speech pathology and law. Methodologically, he leverages linguistic intuition, language processing, as well as naturally occurring data to address theoretical questions and to develop resources that have clear real-world applications, such as speech recognition models, disfluency diagnostic toolkits, and language documentation of minority languages.
组织人事科
2017年5月23日
