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The influence of social knowledge on language processing and production| old_uid | 11863 |
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| title | The influence of social knowledge on language processing and production |
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| start_date | 2012/11/23 |
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| schedule | 11h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | A |
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| summary | Communication is a social activity. As such, it is important to
understand the role that social knowledge plays in language use. I
will show that interlocutors’ social knowledge influences both
language processing and language production, and that the influence
at the individual level can lead to influence at the language
community level. Specifically, I will show that listeners’
expectations of non-native speakers lead them to adjust the manner in
which they process their language, such that they increase their
reliance on top-down processes and decrease the amount of information
they take from the speech when listening to non-native speakers. I
will further show that the adaptation to non-native speakers in
processing is related to adaptation to non-native speakers in
production. Then, using converging evidence from experimental data
and a sociologically rich data set, I will show that sound adaptation
in loanwords is also influenced by social knowledge, and
specifically, by the prestige of the donor language in the loanword’s
domain and by interlocutors’ level of bilingualism and prior
productions. These studies also show how the effects of social
factors on individuals’ rate of sound adaptation can lead to the
emergence of norms and to language change at the community level.
Together, these studies show that social knowledge shapes language
processing and language production and can even influence language
change.
Bio : Shiri LEV-ARI is a post-doctoral scholar at the Laboratoire de
Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique at Ecole Normale Supérieure
in Paris. She is interested in the influence of non-linguistic
factors on language processing and representation, especially when
the resulting variation has social consequences. Her main project
looks at the differences between the way people process native and
non-native speech, and the implications of those differences for
interactions between native and non-native speakers. Another central
project of her examines the role of cognitive factors in determining
the degree to which learning a second language influences learners'
knowledge and use of their first language, as well as the role of
these cognitive factors in determining the degree to which bilinguals
view the world similarly when using their different languages.
She is currently starting to work on the influence of social factors
on sound adaptation in loanwords (source: http://www.lscp.net/persons/
shiri/) |
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| responsibles | Bel, Welby |
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