Vidi Grants for two MPI researchers

October 14, 2010

Current psycholinguistic theories of speech comprehension are built upon evidence that may not be representative of everyday listening. First, theories are built upon data gathered from university students. 'This may create a bias towards a highly proficient population', says Esther Janse of MPI's Individual Differences in Language Processing group. 'Models are also based on idealised materials: clearly articulated speech that does not contain any speech errors or hesitations. Most of the speech we hear is not like that.'

New model of everyday listening

Janse's Vidi project 'What makes a good listener? Correlates of speech-comprehension ability in young and older adults' aims to identify which individual abilities predict speech-processing ability across a range of speech materials and in different listening conditions. 'My research will contribute to a more representative model of speech comprehension in everyday listening.'

Get the focus right!

To ensure efficient communication, speakers flag the new information or focus in a sentence to draw listeners' attention to it. 'Many languages use prosody for this purpose but in different ways. For instance, speakers of Dutch accent the focused constitute, whereas speakers of Korean utter the focused constitute as a new chunk', says Aoju Chen of MPI's Language acquisition group. 'Children need to acquire this usage of prosody, but we hardly know how the acquisition takes place. Moreover, research on language acquisition generally pays little attention to individual variation, whereas individual variation is characteristic of language development.'

Differences among children

In her Vidi project 'Get the focus right: a cross-linguistic study on prosodic encoding of focus in children', Chen and her team will study how four- to ten-year-olds acquire prosodic encoding of focus in four languages - Chinese, Korean, Swedish and Dutch. These languages differ sharply in prosodic realisation of focus. 'I will also investigate developmental differences among children, by following children from two language groups for four years. This project will lead to the first comprehensive theory of acquisition of prosodic focus-marking, with an emphasis on language-specificity and individual variation.'

For more information on these Vidi projects, please contact Esther.Janse@mpi.nl or Aoju.Chen@mpi.nl.