Speaker: Youngah Do
Title: Interaction of the top most and the bottom most: pragmatic bias and perceptual confusability
Time: Tuesday 2/8, 5-6pm, 32-D831
It is well known that multiple linguistic levels interact in language processing (e.g. lexical knowledge to phoneme perception, Ganong 1980; pragmatic contexts to syntactic parsing, Crain & Steedman 1985). This study explores a very challenging case; the interaction of the top most level, pragmatics, and the bottom most level, phonetics.I conduct an experiment in which listeners were presented with nouns containing acoustically ambiguous phonemes, the interpretation of which was potentially biased by (a) the pragmatic context (implicit causality: IC) and (b) the phonological context (velar softening before a high and back vowels).
I expected IC verbs to bias listenersÂ’ expectation for which participant cause the event as in (1).
- Subject-biased context
Ko apologizes Cho because ?
Expectation for ?: Ko over Cho
- Object-biased context
Ko admires Cho because ?
Expectation for ?: Cho over Ko
I also expect that perceptually more confusable nouns such as Ki and Chi override pragmatic inference more.
Results show that pragmatic contexts do bias the perception: listeners perceive confusable nouns more as a subject in subject-biased context. At the same time, acoustic confusability also affects the interpretation of the nouns: [k~ch] before a front vowel [i] context affects pragmatic bias toward or against pragmatically expected noun more than back vowel context.
Upcoming talks:
Feb 11 3:30-5pm: Jonah Katz (Note special day and time!)
Feb 15 5-6pm: AVAILABLE
Mar 1 5-6pm: AVAILABLE
Mar 8 5-6pm: Michael Kenstowicz and Filomena Sandalo
Mar 15 5-6pm: Igor Yanovich
Mar 29 5-6pm: AVAILABLE
Apr 5 5-6pm: AVAILABLE
Apr 12 5-6pm: WCCFL practice talks
Apr 26 5-6pm: AVAILABLE
May 3 5-6pm: AVAILABLE
May 10 5-6pm: AVAILABLE
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