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Max Planck Institute
About MPI

 

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is an institute of the German Max Planck Society. Our mission is to undertake basic research into the psychological,social and biological foundations of language. The goal is to understand how our minds and brains process language, how language interacts with other aspects of mind, and how we can learn languages of quite different types.

The institute is situated on the campus of the Radboud University. We participate in the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, and have particularly close ties to that institute's Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. We also participate in the Centre for Language Studies. A joint graduate school, the IMPRS in Language Sciences, links the Donders Institute, the CLS and the MPI.

 

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Francisco Torreira defends PhD on November 14

Francisco Torreira will defend his thesis 'Speech reduction in spontaneous French and Spanish' on November 14 at 13:30, in the Radboud University aula. The researcher from MPI's Language and Cognition Department found, among other things, that speech reduction can vary greatly across languages.

Francisco Torreira defends PhD on November 14

November 14, 2011

In everyday conversations, we often pronounce speech sounds, syllables, and words less clearly than in formal speech. This phenomenon, known as speech reduction, is pervasive in spontaneous speech. Until recently, researchers in speech science gave little attention to the subject, and phonetic studies on languages other than English, German, and Dutch were scarce.

New corpora

Francisco Torreira decided to remedy this situation by investigating speech reduction in French and Spanish. For this purpose, he created new corpora of French and Spanish spontaneous speech: the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual French and the Nijmegen Corpus of Causal Spanish.

Torreira discovered that the reduction of speech segments in conversational speech can vary greatly across languages. This suggests that phonetic diversity may be greater in everyday spontaneous speech than in the more widely studied laboratory speech.

He also found only partial support for a series of probabilistic effects on speech reduction previously reported for Germanic languages. Torreira concludes: "The role of probabilistic factors on speech production seems to be more complex than is commonly thought." 

Francisco.Torreira@mpi.nl
Last checked 2012-01-24 by Myrna Tinbergen

Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics


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The Netherlands


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