Neurolinguistics seminar by The Lund Neurolinguistics group at our centre on 31st March

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Neurolinguistic Discoveries in Nordic Languages: Perception and Prediction of Speech Input

Seminar by The Lund Neurolinguistics group

Program

The seminar will take place on 31^st March in Room 314 A-B, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University (Universiteto g. 5, Vilnius, Lithuania). The event will be held in English.

Abstracts

Phonetic and phonemic perception of Swedish vowels

Renata Kochančikaitė

Phonemes are the building blocks of meaningful speech. But little is known about how the brain encodes the speech input―continuous acoustic signal―into phonological representations of discrete phoneme categories. Previous neurophysiological experiments suggest that different strategies to achieve this goal are available to the listeners. I will present the results from a behavioural experiment showing individual variation in vowel perception among native speakers of Swedish.

Coarticulation effect in speech perception

Tuğba Lulaci

Coarticulation, the phonetic influence on a specific speech sound from following or preceding speech sounds, plays a role in spoken word recognition. In this talk I will discuss anticipatory coarticulation effect in Swedish words and which cues could be more apparent and helpful for processing and prediction.

Perceiving Danish stød

Anna Hjortdal

Since Verner and Trubetzkoy, the Danish creaky voice feature ‘stød’ has captivated linguists and phoneticians. In this talk, I will present current behavioural and neurolinguistic evidence suggesting that speakers of Danish use the association between stød and morphology to predict upcoming structure. Further, I will touch upon which acoustic cues associated with stød Danish listeners seem to be sensitive to.

The role of Swedish word accents in semantic processing

Jinhee Kwon

Swedish word accents have been considered to perform a stronger grammatical function than semantic roles, as they are highly related to morphological structures (Elert 1964). In this talk, I present a study where I tested the semantic aspect of word accents using minimal pairs and electroencephalography (EEG). The result shows that incongruent pitch accent results in a semantic violation, indicating that word accents do carry a semantic role in parallel with morphological function.

Syntactic complexity and the brain

Claudia Sjöström

Syntactic complexity varies across different sentence structures and the possibilities to exploit syntactic complexity vary across languages. In this talk I will present current findings on syntax processing in the left inferior frontal gyrus and differences in morphosyntactic processing across languages. Further, considering these findings I will discuss the differences in syntactic complexity in two Germanic languages with similar syntax, namely Swedish and German.