Description:

Linguistics Colloquium Series: Jason Bishop

Affiliation: City University of New York (CUNY)

Topic: Planning prosodic structure should give you pause (duration): Evidence from individual differences

Abstract: Findings related to a wide range of phonetic and phonological patterns suggest that speech production planning, at least the earliest stages of it, unfolds in relatively large chunks—chunks that are better defined in terms of phrase-level prosodic units than in terms of one-or-two-word sequences (Keating & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2002). More recently, research in phonetics and psycholinguistics has begun to explore the extent to which planning might be flexible – i.e., the idea that the scope of speakers’ planning of an upcoming utterance is sensitive to both external (e.g. speaking conditions) and internal (e.g. cognitive limitations) factors. In this talk, I’ll discuss findings from a large-scale production study with American English speakers that bears on the role of a speaker-internal factor, namely working memory capacity (WMC). Based on evidence for systematic relationships between speakers’ WMC, prosodic phrasing choices and silent pause durations, I argue that speakers with greater WMC engage in longer-distance phonological planning, and in ways broadly consistent with a proposal in Krivokapić (2012).

References:

Keating, P. & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2002). A Prosodic View of Word Form Encoding for Speech Production", UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, 101, 112-156.

Krivokapić, J. (2012). Prosodic planning in speech production. In S. Fuchs, M. Weihrich, D. Pape, & P. Perrier (Eds.): Speech planning and dynamics. Berlin: Peter Lang. (pp. 157–190).

Recording of the talk is available upon request. Please contact Linguistics@northwestern.edu