Multidisciplinary speech research seminar with Anja Arnhold and Juhani Järvikivi, 4 Sep

The seminar will open with two exciting talks by visiting professors from University of Alberta, Canada: Anja Arnhold and Juhani Järvikivi.

In the afternoon, researchers from Tampere University’s speech research community will present their current projects and studies.

Date and time: Friday 4 September, 10 am to 5 pm

Location: Pinni B3109, City Centre Campus (or you can join us via Zoom) (https://tuni.zoom.us/j/62089041836?pwd=2tVewOFviU5Kh4WUwCHKB8fFjJyfYm.1)

Come see how multifaceted speech research is at Tampere University! No registration needed. (Please note that lunch or coffee are not included.)

10.15–10.20 Opening words

10.20–11.15 Anja Arnhold: Prosody-syntax interactions in focus marking: All together now! … Or not?

11.15–12.10 Juhani Järvikivi: Disfluencies, deception, and uh…umm… accents

12.10–13.10 Lunch break

13.10–13.35 Heini Kallio: Pronunciation of Finland Swedish in beginner learners: first-language effects

13.35–14.00 Paula Laine: Variation of Finnish /s/ in different dialects and its effects on listener interpretations and language attitudes

14.00–14.25 Mikko Pajunen: Is there a first-language advantage in learning phonological quantity in Finnish?

14.25–14.40 Coffee break

14.40–15.05 Okko Räsänen: An overview of speech research in Speech and Cognition research group

15.05–15.30 Kalle Lahtinen: Study of affect in spontaneous Finnish

15.30–15.55 Anna Słocińska: Can speech reveal early signs of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s Disease? The AAVISTUS Project

15.55–16.10 Coffee break

16.10–16.35 Elina Vasu: Towards teaching L2s for comfortable intelligibility.

16.35–17.00 Claire Nance: Articulatory and social sources of phonetic variation

Anja Arnhold, University of Alberta

Prosody marks focus in many languages (e.g. English When will the workshop happen?– The workshop will happen in SEPTEMBER vs. What will happen in September?  – The WORKSHOP will happen in September). However, prosody is not the only available means of focus marking in many languages (e.g. English cleft sentences: It a workshop that happens in September, not a conference). However, languages differ in their prosodic systems, as well as in their morpho-syntactic flexibility. Moreover, many linguists assume that language has evolved to be efficient and to avoid redundancy, and that complexity in one component of language (e.g. syntax) restricts complexity in another component (e.g. prosody).

Put together, this raises several questions: Will speakers and listeners use prosody when focus is already marked by morpho-syntax? Will they use morpho-syntax more when prosody is not available – and vice versa? Does this differ between languages, depending on the inherent flexibility of their prosodic and morpho-syntactic systems? In other words: Can we find trade-offs between prosody and other components of grammar?

This talk will present some past, ongoing and planned future experimental work addressing these questions. Featured languages include English, Finnish, Kalaallisut and Mandarin.

Juhani Järvikivi, University of Alberta

Recent psycholinguistic research has shown that a foreign accent influences language processing in various domains beyond just adding a general difficulty, including lexical processing, semantic and syntactic prediction, and pragmatic inferences. For example, whereas in native accented speech, filled pauses like uh’sor umm’s have been shown to prompt an expectation that a less typical or a more low frequency word will follow, this is not the case if the speaker has a foreign accent. Some research suggests that this may be because in non-native speech, disfluencies are more frequent and less predictable than in native speech. Interestingly, disfluencies have also been associated with deception: listeners take increased use of fillers and hesitation markers to indicate that the speaker is being less than truthful, at least if the speaker sounds like an adult native speaker. Do disfluencies in non-native or less typical speaker accents prompt the same association?

I will discuss results from a series of ongoing Treasure hunt experiments. Participants listened to spoken instructions like the treasure is behind the bear vs. the treasure is behind thee…uh.. bear and were asked to click on the object that they thought hides the treasure, while we recorded their eye movements to the respective pictures (e.g., bear vs. hat). The instructions came from either a native (Experiment 1) or a foreign-accented (Experiment 2) adult English speaker, or a native English speaking 7-year-old child (Experiment 3). Participants’ eye movements and subsequent selections reveal their biases during real-time processing of fluent and disfluent utterances as well as their later judgments of whether the speaker was indicating the true location of the treasure or not.