Job Talk: Dr. Tuuli Morrill. The perception of prosody: its role in lexical access and acquisition

Wednesday, February 5, 2014 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM EST
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In order to understand language, humans make use of a variety of cues that signal the underlying linguistic structure and meaning of an utterance. The phonetic correlates of prosody function as one of the available cues to phrasal structure and lexical content. However, the cognitive mechanisms by which prosodic structure is perceived and interpreted are not well understood. What kinds of acoustic information does the listener use to facilitate comprehension? To what extent do the cognitive mechanisms involved in the perception of prosody play a role in first and second language acquisition? In this talk, I will present a series of experiments which investigate the nature of the perceptual mechanisms involved in the interpretation of prosodic structure, as well as interactions between prosodic structure and language acquisition. The first set of experiments tests a perceptual grouping hypothesis, examining the extent to which linguistic rhythm can affect word segmentation and lexical access in the absence of local phonetic correlates of prosodic structure. I examine the degree to which such a perceptual mechanism can access abstract linguistic tonal categories and distinct rhythmic structures. The second set of experiments uses both artificial language and natural language stimuli in statistical learning paradigms, to examine the role of linguistic rhythm in the acquisition of a new language, as well as the effects of native language prosodic structure on the acquisition of second language phonological knowledge. Findings from these two lines of research suggest that both local and phrase-level correlates of linguistic rhythm directly affect the perception of phonological structure and lexical access, and may play an important role in first and second language acquisition.