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The processing of intonation and intonational meaning| old_uid | 10634 |
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| title | The processing of intonation and intonational meaning |
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| start_date | 2012/01/06 |
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| schedule | 11h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | A |
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| summary | In this talk I will discuss a number of studies that investigate how listeners process the melody of an utterance in online speech comprehension. In the first part, I will discuss how listeners process utterances with an unfamiliar or infrequent intonation contour, using imitation, monitoring as well as priming tasks. Our results show that unfamiliar (or infrequent) intonation contours are mapped to frequent ones; however, this process is costly, leading to delays in lexical access of the same magnitude as mismatching phonemes. In the second part, I will present studies concerned with the on-line interpretation of intonational meaning, comparing utterances with a semantic contrast to utterances with a neutral intonation contour. Our results show that listeners immediately activate alternatives to the accented words (e.g., pelican-flamingo), corroborating alternative semantic approaches. In the last part, I will discuss evidence from eye-tracking experiments showing how listeners can use intonation to predict the future course of an utterance. Taken together, our findings lend support to integrative speech perception models.
Bettina Braun has a M.A. in phonetics/phonology from Saarland University, and a PhD in phonetics/phonology from Saarland University and University of Edinburgh (Bill Barry & Bob Ladd) on "production and perception of contrastive themes in German". She made her post-doctorat at the Phonetics lab at the University of Oxford and at the MPI for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen). Since 2009, she is assistant professor at the University of Konstanz.
Her main research interests concern prosody, intonation, laboratory phonology, information structure, and intonation in L1 and L2 acquisition. |
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| responsibles | Bel, Welby |
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