FOS: Fwd: [lin-colloq] Michigan State University Linguistics Colloquium - Laura Dilley (11/30) - Wells B342

[Suzanne Evans Wagner]

Dear all,

This semester's final Linguistics Colloquium talk will be of interest to
many on these lists. Laura Dilley will be talking about her current
research program, which incorporates consideration of social cues into her
work on speech perception. I hope you'll be able to make it at this busy
time of the semester!

Best,
Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: smit2297 <smit2297 at msu.edu>
Date: Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 1:25 PM
Subject: [lin-colloq] Michigan State University Linguistics Colloquium -
Laura Dilley (11/30) - Wells B342
To: lin-colloq at lin.msu.edu <lin-colloq at lin.msu.edu>
Cc: Nelson, Scott James <nelso672 at msu.edu>


Good afternoon,


This is a reminder from the MSU Linguistics Colloquium Committee that our
last colloquium of the Fall 2017 semester is this Thursday, November 30th
at 4:30pm, in B342 Wells Hall. Our speaker is Professor Laura
Dilley (Michigan State University), whose talk is titled "Speech perception
as prediction: Extracting words, social cues, meaning, and structure from
biological signals" (abstract below). We will have a coffee reception at
4PM in Wells B342, but there  will not be a dinner following this
week's talk.


The schedule for the rest of the colloquium series can be found on our
website. Please do not hesitate to contact us if there are any questions or
concerns. Thanks for being a part of the colloquium series this semester
and we hope to see you on Thursday!


Sincerely,

Kaylin Smith and Scott Nelson

MSU Linguistics Colloquium Committee Co-Chairs smit2297 at msu.edu,
nelso672 at msu.edu


_____________
*Speech perception as prediction: Extracting words, social cues, meaning,
and structure from biological** signals*

Laura Dilley (Michigan State University)

There is a tremendous amount of variability in speech signals. Given this
variability, how are human listeners so readily able to extract words and
linguistic structures, as well as social cues, from speech? Current
empirical and theoretical work views the brain as a complex prediction
engine which attempts to minimize prediction error: the brain adaptively
recapitulates a signal source and tries to compare it with incoming sensory
information, and in minimizing the difference, arrives at an
interpretation. Under this view, prediction enables the brain to extract
information, including what a person is saying, what their intent is, and
whether the person talking is female and/or African American. In this
presentation I will discuss current research in my lab that relates to
inferences drawn by listeners about words and social meanings from two
sources of variability: variability in the prosody of context speech (e.g.,
its rhythm, pitch, and timing) and variability in formant frequencies
(i.e., the dynamically-varying natural resonances of the vocal cavity). I
will consider cases of both Standard American English and African American
English dialects. It is argued that listeners take both short- and
long-term statistics of acoustic cues in speech, including context prosody
and formant frequencies, along with the social contexts in which speech
signals occurred. This approach is argued to shed light on understanding
how spoken language is effectively used by humans to convey communicative
intent.

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