Michael Tanenhaus, visiting MIT to give a colloquium talk, will talk about speech at a special meeting of the Phonology Circle December 4th, 1:30pm-2:30pm. Please stay tuned for an announcement about the exact location.
Speaker: Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)
Title: Fine-grained phonetic detail in spoken word recognition
Time: Friday 12/4, 1:30-2:30 pm
Location: TBA
Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, it is widely assumed that some classes of speech sounds are perceived categorically in a way that exemplars from other types of non-speech categories are not. Yet, the articulation of many sounds, including consonants, varies systematically with position in a prosodic domain. A system that discarded sub-phonetic detail would thus be ignoring potentially useful information. I’ll review recent data from eye-tracking studies demonstrating that spoken word recognition does, in fact, exploit fine-grained sub-phonetic detail to make probabilistic hypothesis about lexical candidates, including within-category variation for stop consonants—the poster child for categorical perception.