s éries de 4 conférences par John Kingston les 15,22,29 mai et 5 juin à Paris : Listening to speech, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?_organis=E9es_?=par le labex EFL

Thu May 10 05:40:53 UTC 2012

Le labex Empirical Foundations of Linguistics a la plaisir de vous convier
à la série de quatre conférences de

*John Kingston*
Professeur de Linguistique
 Département de Linguistique
de l'Université du Massachusetts

*les 15, 22, 29 Mai et 5 Juin 2012 *
*de 14:00 à 16:00h*
*
*

 *Salle Benvéniste au 3ième étage*
*à l'ILPGA, 19 rue des Bernardins, 75 005 Paris*

Métro: Maubert-Mutualité
*
*

Vous trouverez le résumé de ce séminaire ci dessous et en fichier joint.

Pour toute information supplémentaire, contacter le correspondant labex EFL
du professeur invité par le labex: Barbara Kuhnert,
 barbara.kuhnert at univ-paris3.fr <http://barbara.kuhnert@univ-paris3.fr/>

ou telephoner au 0615939471

---

*Listening to speech*
*John Kingston

*Are the objects of speech perception auditory qualities or articulatory
gestures? This course shows that this is
not a parochial question, of interest only to phoneticians and
phonologists, but belongs to a much larger debate in
psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy about the
nature of percepts, which can itself be cast in
the form of an apparently simple as well as ancient question: are percepts
in the world or in the head? In its modern
form, this question is about whether and how cognition is embodied and
extended rather than computed.
To listeners, sounds appear to occur in the world, where the
sound-producing event occurs, e.g. speech sounds
appear to come from the speaker’s mouth. This phenomenological
characteristic has motivated many philosophers
to argue that auditory percepts are these external events or the objects
that they produce in the world, and not the
sensations they produce in the listener. The external alternative is also
encouraged by evidence that percepts are
grounded in how the perceiver’s body interacts with the world, and that
they may apprehend information arrays that
are wholly outside the perceiver. In this course, I contrast this external
or embodied and extended account with
the internal alternative (which I advocate), that auditory percepts must be
in the head, because they are produced by
considerable mental computation, including sophisticated inferences, and
that the apparent external phenomenological
character of sounds is a projection into the world of the outputs of these
computations and inferences.
The choice here is between a theory about the overt, public, or
phenomenological aspects of auditory percepts
versus one about the covert, private, and internal processes that produce
those aspects. Regardless of whether the
listeners is perceiving speech or some other kind of sound, I argue that
the theory should first account for the covert
internal processes and then use their mechanisms and outputs to account for
the overt characteristics of percepts.
For example, it should acknowledge that listeners separate concurrent
vowels perceptually and produce the cocktail
party effect by the vowels’ spectral prominences rather than their entire
spectra, by their perceived pitches rather than
such waveform properties as misaligned harmonics or asynchronous pitch
periods, and via glimpses of one vowel’s
formants during brief intervals when they are more prominent than the
other’s rather than via the gestalt principle of
good continuation. Even though I argue that percepts are first in the head
and only eventually in the world, the course’s
ultimate goal is to reconcile and integrate evidence from empirical studies
of listeners’ behavior with philosophical
and psychological arguments based on their phenomenological experience.
How do the competing accounts of the objects of speech perception represent
competing sides in this larger debate?
According to the motor theory, listeners recognize speech sounds by
internally emulating the articulation of the sound
they have just heard and matching the internal acoustic simulacrum produced
by the emulation to the heard sound’s
acoustics. By relying on emulation of the speaker’s articulations, the
motor theory instantiates embodied cognition.
According to the direct realist theory, no emulation is necessary because a
speech sound’s articulation so structures the
signal’s acoustic properties that they provide all the information needed
to identify the responsible articulation. Be-
cause this information is in the world and its source can be recognized by
inverting the transformation of articulations
into acoustics, direct realism instantiates extended cognition. Both the
motor and direct realist theories also easily
accommodate the integration of the visual information obtained from
watching the speaker’s face with the auditory
information conveyed by the signal’s acoustic properties. According to the
auditory alternative, emulation is unneces-
sary because non-human listeners respond like human listeners to speech
sounds, inversion is impossible because the
relationship between articulations and acoustics is many-to-many rather
than one-to-one, and visual-auditory integra-
tion must be late rather than immediate. Auditory transformations of speech
sounds’ acoustic properties make it easier
for the listener to distinguish one speech sound from another by
integrating psychoacoustically similar properties and
also easier to parse the signal into its constituent sounds by exaggerating
the perceived difference between successive
sounds. The auditory alternative also accounts for similarities between
listeners’ responses to non-speech analogues
and their responses to the original speech sounds.
This brief and selective review shows that the debate remains unresolved
because the competing sides appeal to
different kinds of evidence. The auditory account relies on covert aspects
of listeners’ responses to speech signals, the
inaccessibility of articulations and internal computations, unconscious
analogies, and inferences, while the articulatory
alternative relies on overt aspects of those responses, what the perceiver
sees as well as what they hear and thus links
of percepts to actions, how listening to speech is described, and how it
differs from listening to non-speech.
The course first reviews the six decades of research on speech perception
and its relationships to speech produc-
tion since WWII, then situates speech perception within research in
philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and
artificial intelligence into sound perception, and ends by discussing new
experimental studies of decisive predictions
of the competing accounts.

Prof. Jacqueline Vaissière
Membre Senior, Institut Universitaire de France
Laboratoire de Phonétique et de Phonologie (LPP), UMR7018 (
http://lpp.univ-paris3.fr)
Laboratoire d'excellence Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (EFL),
Sorbonne Paris Cité
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle et CNRS
ILPGA, 19 rue des Bernardins, 75005 Paris
tel: 06 15 93 94 71 (01 43 26 57 17: gestionnaire du laboratoire)

http://www.personnels.univ-paris3.fr/users/vaissier/pub/ARTICLES/index.htm
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