Research in the Psycholinguistics Lab
Shari R. Speer, P.I.
The majority of our research involves experiments with normal adult listeners who participate in language production, head-mounted eyetracking, and a variety of reaction-time tasks. Participants listen to spoken language and respond by following commands, pressing a button, or by pronouncing a word as quickly as possible. Often, the materials presented are natural speech, but some of our speech materials are digitally manipulated in order to control particular aspects of their intonation or rhythm.
Recent Projects
- Prosodic focus in production and comprehension, English and Japanese
Ito, K., Speer, S.R., & Beckman, M. (2003, March). The influence of given-new status and lexical accent on intonation in Japanese spontaneous speech, Presentation to the Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, Boston, Mass. [pdf]
Ito, K. & Speer, S.R. (2005, April). The effect of intonation on visual search: An eye-tracking study, Presentation to Experimental Pragmatics: Exploring the Cognitive Basis of Conversation, The British Academy, Cambridge, UK. [ppt]
- Lexical tone and lexical access in Mandarin
Previous studies have shown a processing advantage for segmental information over tone information during the recognition of lexical items in tone languages. We conducted two cross-modal semantic priming experiments comparing the processing of tonally ambiguous and unambiguous words in sentence contexts. Ambiguity was constructed by the operation of a phonological rule, third tone sandhi, whereby the first morpheme of a tone2-tone3 sequence may be underlyingly either a tone2 or tone3 word. Listeners heard sentence fragments that ended in a tone2, sandhi tone2, sandhi sequence tone2-3, or tone 3 word. Results showed that although sandhi tone2 syllables differ phonetically from tone2 syllables, all forms of tone2 are ambiguous, that is, naming times for visual semantic associates of both the tone2 and tone3 meanings were shorter than for irrelevant targets. In contrast, naming times for tone3 items are shorter for visual associates of the tone3 meaning than for associates of the tone2 meaning. These initial results are currently being explored in a series of eyetracking experiments.
Xu, Lei & Speer, Shari (2004, November). Lexical tone and lexical priming in spoken Mandarin. Talk presented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Minneapolis, MN. [ppt]
- The role of prosodic phrase boundaries in the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity in English and Japanese
Laurie Maynell's dissertation research examines the role of prosodic phrase boundaries in resolving relative clause attachment ambiguities in both English and Japanese. Her prediction is that prosodic boundaries will serve the same function in both languages, i.e. will lead to resolution of the ambiguity in the same way, event hough these two langauges are structurally quite different. If this prediction is borne out, it will support the idea of prosodic phrasing as a cross-linguistic parsing mechanism.
- Effect of prosody and context on the comprehension of syntactic ambiguity in English and Korean
Soyoung Kang's dissertation research focuses on how prosodic structures interact with previously presented contextual information in the resolution of reflexive pronouns in present participle constructions in English and in the recovery of empty pronouns in Korean. Soyoung's previous work includes comparisons of prosodic and syntactic processing in English, Korea, and Japanese. Her main interest lies in the cross-linguistic study of the use of prosodic information in the comprehension of spoken languages.
- The interaction of prosodic phrasing, verb bias, and plausibility during spoken sentence comprehension
Allison Blodgett's dissertation research used cross-modal naming and a temporary syntactic ambiguity (e.g., Whenever the lady checks the room) to investigate the interaction of prosodic phrasing, verb bias, and plausibility during spoken language comprehension in English. The results provide new evidence that IP boundary location can determine the initial syntactic structure for these closure ambiguities-regardless of verb bias. The results support previous claims that IP boundaries trigger semantic wrap-up, and they provide new evidence that these boundaries trigger syntactic wrap-up as well. Although these wrap-up processes helped disambiguate the closure ambiguity, other prosodic and lexical factors were also involved. When wrap-up occurred at a transitive-bias verb, it resulted in syntactic and semantic representations that conflicted in terms of transitivity. Resolution of this conflict depended on the location of the structurally ambiguous NP within the global prosodic representation and the predictability of that NP as a direct object.
Blodgett, A. (2004). The interaction of prosodic phrasing, verb bias, and plausibility during spoken sentence comprehension. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Ohio State University. [pdf]
- The role of pitch range in the production and perception of prosodic structure and discourse structure in Korean.
Eunjong Kong is currently investigating the categorical perception of pitch range reset and its association with the hierarchical units defined in Korean intonation structure. She is conducting a series of experiments that test pitch range reset as a cue to certain levels of intonational units.
Kong, E. (2004). The role of pitch range variation in the discourse structure and intonation structure of Korean.
Proceedings of INTERSPEECH - 2004, 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Jeju Island, Korea. [pdf]
Poster presented at INTERSPEECH - 2004, 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Jeju Island, Korea, October. [ppt]
- Prosodic focus and discourse structure in Veneto and Romagnolo Italian
Anouschka Bergmann is currently working on the relationship between prosodic focus and discourse structure in several varieties of Italian. Her future projects include work on prosodic focus and discourse structure in French and the processing of ambiguities in Turkish.
- Effects of Variation in Speech in Production and Perception
Robin Dautricourt's work explores the sources of variation in speech production and investigates how variation in pronunciation affects speech perception. A project which developed out of his involvement in the creation of the Buckeye corpus of spontaneous speech was a study of the factors which influence pronunciation variants in the word boundary palatalization environment. That is, when and why are sequences like 'that you' and 'did you' pronounced as 'thatchou' and 'didjou'? The corpus data on which the palatalization production study was based also served as stimuli in psycholinguistic experiments which compared the effects of pronunciation variants on word recognition. In Robin's dissertation, he investigates how word recognition is affected by the presence or absence of word-final liaison consonants in spoken French. Liaison is influenced by a variety of linguistic and social factors, and he tests the hypothesis that listeners are able to use this knowledge during word recognition, in a series of experiments which use read and spontaneous speech stimuli.