32.1747, FYI: Laura Dilley ExLing Tutorial

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-1747. Wed May 19 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.1747, FYI: Laura Dilley ExLing Tutorial

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Date: Wed, 19 May 2021 07:12:56
From: Antonis Botinis [info at exlingsociety.com]
Subject: Laura Dilley ExLing Tutorial

 
Language understanding, prosody, and segments: Role of the predictive brain
May 28th, 16.00 GMT, https://exlingsociety.com/exling-tutorials.html

The past half century of linguistic research has seen dramatic changes in the
way researchers frame and conceptualize language as a human capacity. In this
talk I will present a synthesis of insights from recent decades and argue that
language is the outgrowth of perception, action, and cognition. Language
perception does not entail mere recovery of abstract linguistic units;
instead, social and ecological contexts shape how linguistic units are
understood to be composed, and how meanings are apprehended.

Prosody has long been held to be a mere overlay on implicitly foundational
segmental underpinnings of sentences. Contrasting with this view, I will
present an overview of experimental work from my lab which shows that, perhaps
surprisingly, distal context prosody can alter perception of lexical and
segmental content, as well as meaning. For example, changing only prosody in
initial distal portions of utterances may cause listeners to hear a word
string as ending, alternatively, with timer derby or tie murder bee, or a
sentence to contain either saw a raccoon or else saw raccoons. Such
traditionally unexpected findings highlight the role of predictive brain
mechanisms tuned to language-relevant timescales in apprehending – emergently
– the meaning, form, and content. Arriving at new insights regarding such
effects requires challenging some long-held assumptions about the synchronic
relationship of prosody to words and meanings.

I argue that viewing linguistic capacities as grounded in temporal dynamics of
social brains permits new insights into some of the most historically
challenging linguistic problems, including perception of speech, apprehension
of meaning, and ontology of language, while also fostering novel connections
among linguistic sub-disciplines.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
                     Phonetics





 



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