[Colloq] Lori Holt - Online regularities and prior knowledge conspire to shape speech perception
[Colloq] Lori Holt - Online regularities and prior knowledge conspire to shape speech perception
September 10 at 3:00, our departmental colloquium welcomes Professor Lori Holt, via Zoom, from Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Institute. Her talk argues that "Online regularities and prior knowledge conspire to shape speech perception."
Abstract
Across cognitive domains, successful behavior tends to require that systems strike a balance between stability and plasticity. On the one hand, there is a need to align behavior with long-term regularities -- such as the speech patterns of a native language community. On the other hand, short-term input sometimes departs from these long-term patterns – such as in encountering a talker with accented speech. I will share a program of research that aims to understand more about how speech perception strikes this balance. In preview, the studies I will share demonstrate rapid flexibility in the mapping of speech input, graded sensitivity to short-term regularities, the ability to track multiple regularities, and individual differences that reveal mechanistic bases for this rapid learning. I will argue that knowledge of the canonical mapping of acoustic input to native-language speech categories conspires with short-term input regularities to trigger rapid adjustments in the mapping of acoustics to speech categories at a pre-lexical level.