Finnish Academy of Science and Letters grant

Finnish Academy of Science and Letters grant for doctoral dissertation
Project title: Making sense of natural speech: prosodic cues in language segmentation
Duration: 3 years
Funding body: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters
Amount: €75,000

Description

My doctoral research aims at studying how prosodic features contribute to online chunking of continuous speech in different languages: English and Russian. Behavioral and neural findings have already showed that prosody plays a major part in understanding spoken language. However, these studies were largely done using sentences, words, or even smaller units of speech (syllables, phonemes, etc), artificially constructed for the experiments. Therefore, we have little evidence on how listeners respond to natural, continuous speech. This research will differ from previous studies in two main ways. Firstly, it will investigate natural authentic speech (high studio quality recordings from conversations and lectures). Secondly, considering the the scarcity of studies on different languages and the discrepant findings from them, it is important to turn to another typologically different language. Russian is well-suited for this purpose, for its brain dynamics during speech comprehension is under-investigated. The results are expected to provide insight into the cues listeners use for chunking and contribute to the discussion on whether a language type can explain the neural differences during listening to speech. It can also help to determine the boundaries of prosodic variability across languages, which is a major contribution to understanding linguistic variation more generally. Moreover, a more targeted understanding of prosody can help improve speech synthesizers produce more comprehensible speech in different languages.