Integrating prosodic prominence in speech perception
In this talk I will discuss some of my dissertation work which examines how listeners are influenced by context in speech perception – in particular, prosodic context conveying prominence. We know that listeners comprehend (1) segmental/phonemic contrasts and (2) prosodic features in spoken language, but one fairly open question is if and how these two processes interact. The interaction we will focus on is how contextual prosodic information impacts perception of segmental material, in light of the way segment and prosody jointly structure acoustic information in the speech signal. Adopting the test case of vowel contrasts, we’ll explore how different types of prominence-lending contexts shape perception of vowel formants. With visual-world eyetracking data we’ll also consider how listeners integrate prominence cues with formants online, and explore what sort of processing is implicated, testing previous claims that prosody shows a relatively delayed influence in speech comprehension.