The predictive strength of linguistic cues: Neurophysiological and behavioural evidence from Danish stød and Swedish word accents

Activity: Talk or presentationInvited talk

Description

When listening to speech, we predict upcoming linguistic information based on the linguistic cues available to us. The predictions can be broad and vague or quite specific. Linguistic cues, in turn, vary in their reliability and predictive usefulness. In this talk, I will present evidence from two studies investigating how the predictive strength of speech cues affects language processing. We investigated how listeners use phonetic and phonological cues associated with the Danish creaky voice prosodic feature ‘stød’ to predict upcoming suffixes (Hjortdal et al., 2022). Listeners seem to use both phonetic and phonological stød cues predictively. However, phonological cues override phonetic ones, probably because they are more reliable and thus provide stronger cues to upcoming morphemes. In a meta-analysis of three North Germanic language varieties, we investigated how processes associated with lexical access modulate event-related potentials (Hjortdal et al., in review). We used information-theoretical measures to quantify the lexical uncertainty and information gain associated with suprasegmental cues unfolding on top of segmental cues and examined how these measures correlated with brain potentials. The results indicate that listeners are sensitive to how certain they can be about the lexical identity of unfolding words based on the speech sounds currently available to them.
Period2023 Jan 26
Held atUniversity of Glasgow, United Kingdom
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Free keywords

  • ERP
  • brain
  • prosody
  • prediction
  • cue