Title: "Different speakers, different contexts, different listening conditions: Children's ability to process variation during linguistic tasks"
Speaker: Giovanna Morini, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences
Date: Wednesday, March 26; 12-1 PM
Room: LeFrak Hall Room 0135
Abstract:
Listeners regularly encounter a great deal of variability in the language surrounding them. This variation can come from talkers who produce words differently (such as speakers from different dialects), from exposure to input that contains different amounts of information (e.g., both single- and multi-word utterances), or from hearing speech presented in less than optimal listening conditions (e.g., daycares and classrooms where there are high noise levels). These situations require the listener to rely on a variety of cognitive and linguistic skills in order to successfully understand the message being conveyed. The listener must sort through information associated with the speech signal and focus on the relevant portions of the message. How is it that we are able to do this? How early in life are these abilities present? Could factors such as age and language experience (e.g., learning one versus two languages) influence listeners’ ability to process language variation? I will introduce different lines of work that investigate these issues. This includes data from studies designed to examine the extent to which young children who are just beginning to learn their native language adjust their perception to accomplish language comprehension in the midst of variability, and work investigating whether or not there are differences in how monolingual and bilingual toddlers approach these common language-related challenges.
