James German教授專題演講 發佈時間:April 7, 2017, 4:19 p.m.


講 者:James Sneed German (Aix-Marseille University)
主 題:Social Information in the Representation of Linguistic Categories
時 間:106年4月11日 (星期二)上午10:30-12點
地 點:中研院語言所5樓519會議室
摘 要:

In this talk, I will discuss the scope and findings of a project that explores how social information is incorporated into the link between concrete and abstract linguistic representations, with a particular emphasis on intonation. A wide range of studies over the last 15 years suggests that categorization and lower-level processing of phonetic inputs are dynamically influenced by the ambient social setting in which they occur. These studies, however, have emphasized within-segment variation to the exclusion of other types of abstraction, such as higher-level phonological alignments or intonational categories. In the present project, we explore, first of all, how implicit priming with social indices influences the interpretation of intonation contours in two dialect contact situations: Corsican French vis-à-vis continental French, and Singapore English vis-à-vis American English. A second set of studies revisits findings by Gussenhoven and Rietveld (1998), which explored whether gender-specific aspects of the speech signal influence the perception of prominence in Dutch. In contrast to the earlier study, we make use of unaltered speech samples produced by English speakers from a range of gender identities, and perceived speaker gender is controlled independently of the speech signal. These findings have important implications for the overall architecture of the intonational-phonological grammar, which is argued to differ in non-trivial ways from that of the segmental-phonological grammar.