Cognitive Science Speaker Series | Suprasegmental cues as a window into phonological and prosodic encoding in production
Speaker: Andres Buxo-Lugo, Ph.D.
Title: Amplifying Individual Differences with Personalized Brain Network Models
Short Bio: Andrés Buxó-Lugo is an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, where he leads the Language Processing and Computation Lab. Andrés is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He got his BA in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned his PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before arriving to Buffalo, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Rochester’s department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and as a President’s Fellow at the University of Maryland at College Park. His research aims to uncover the cognitive mechanisms that allow humans to produce and understand language. He has been especially interested in the processes and representations necessary for processing speech prosody and what suprasegmental cues such as word durations, intonation, and intensity reveal about language processing.
Abstract: A crucial part of spoken communication is assigning sounds to the selected words and meanings we want to convey. Learning about the processes that allow us to turn messages into sounds, however, is challenging and has often relied on two sources of information: speech errors, and reaction time data. One relatively under-explored window into these processes is the suprasegmental characteristics of a spoken word. I will present two lines of research that attempt to uncover the phonological and prosodic encoding processes by investigating how recent productions and exposures affect words’ durations and prosodic cues. One set of projects follow up on previous research that established that speakers tend to lengthen words when they have recently produced a word with overlapping onsets (e.g., beaker - beetle; Sevald & Dell, 1994; Watson, Buxó-Lugo, & Simmons, 2015). I will present research that shows that this lengthening occurs even if speakers merely heard an overlapping word, and present a computational model that explains this lengthening pattern as emerging from interference when mapping different meanings to similar forms. I will then present new research that investigates whether prosodic productions (in this case, contrastive focus) can be primed by recently processed utterances. Lastly, I will summarize the implications of this work on phonological and prosodic encoding processes.
ASL-English interpreters have been requested. Light refreshments will be provided.
Event Snapshot
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Who
Open to the Public
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Yes