Fwd: 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

Fri May 11 21:16:40 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

-- 

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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