Two invited addresses: Pam Beddor
Pam Beddor gave two keynote presentations this summer:
(1) Nasal 2009 International Workshop, co-organized by the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique (Université Paul Valéry) and the Laboratoire des Sciences de la Parole (Université de Mons-Hainaut):
Title: The perceptual time course of nasals and nasalization
Abstract: Perceptual findings from identification, discrimination, gating, and reaction time studies show that listeners use coarticulatory vowel nasalization as information about a flanking nasal consonant. In ongoing work being done in our psycholinguistics laboratory (with Julie Boland, Andries Coetzee, and Kevin McGowan), we are studying listeners’ moment-by-moment processing of this information as it unfolds over time. In this research, English-speaking participants’ eye movements are monitored as they hear instructions to look at one of two pictured objects on a computer screen. Trials include pictured pairs for words of the form CVNC-CVC (e.g., bend-bed), CVNC-CVNC (e.g., bend-bent), and CVC-CVC (e.g., bed-bet). Preliminary results show that, when participants hear a CVNC word (bend), they visually fixate the correct picture earlier when the competing picture is CVC (bed) than when the competitor is another CVNC word (bent). Assuming a 200 ms delay for programming an eye movement (Dahan et al., 2001, Language and Cognitive Processes 16: 507-534), the evidence suggests that participants often fixate the target CVNC picture in CVNC-CVC trials after onset of vowel nasalization but before onset of N. However, although vowel nasalization facilitates early selection of CVNC over CVC words, a non-nasalized vowel is notsimilarly helpful for selecting CVC over CVNC. That is, when participants hear a CVC word (bed), they do not fixate the correct picture earlier when the competing picture is CVNC (bend) than when the competitor is CVC (bet). These perceptual findings will be interpreted in light of both production data (especially highly variable nasal coarticulation in English) and other perceptual processes (in particular, compensation for coarticulation).
Invited presentation to the Laboratoire des Sciences de la Parole at the Université de Mons-Hainaut, Mons, Belgium.
Title: The time course of perception of coarticulation