Rate and Rhythm in speech Recognition (R3)

Speech is fast: talkers can produce spontaneous speech with syllables that last only a tenth of a second. Speech is also a pseudo-rhythmic signal. It contains pronounced amplitude fluctuations driven by the ebb and flow of words in canonical vs. reduced form, stressed vs. unstressed syllables, loud vowels vs. softer consonants. Together, these temporal aspects of speech are crucial for communication: if the rhythm of speech is destroyed, intelligibility drops dramatically. Yet which perceptual, cognitive, and neurobiological mechanisms support the temporal processing of speech remains unclear. This workshop brings together rate and rhythm researchers from the field of phonetics, psycholinguistics, language development, and cognitive neuroscience in an attempt to bridge the methodological, conceptual, and terminological divides. The workshop will provide a multidisciplinary perspective on some of the key questions in the field, including:

• Attention to context: How is the perception of the temporal properties of speech guided by the phonetic, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the surrounding speech? What is the role of attention in these context effects?
• Multimodal processing: Does the processing of rate and rhythm involve domain-general or also domain-specific cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms that only contribute to the processing of spoken, musical, or visual (e.g., lip movements, beat gestures, etc.) rhythmic signals?
• Individual variation: What drives variation in human listeners’ rhythmic processing skills? What speech and language pathologies may be results of atypical rhythmic processing?
• Neurobiology: Which temporal processing properties of the brain constrain the way that speech is recognized and comprehended? Can neural stimulation techniques provide promising avenues for facilitating speech comprehension?

The workshop will work towards a more comprehensive understanding of rate and rhythm processing in general, and in spoken language in particular. The workshop will be held on Friday December 13th, 2019, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. All talks will take place in the MPI Auditorium, room 163.

Program

9.00   

Introduction
Hans Rutger Bosker

9.15   

How listeners use speech rate variation to tune their speech perception.
Merel Maslowski

10.00

Word recognition and segmentation as inference over hierarchically-embedded syllable and phoneme abstractions.
Laura Dilley

10.45   

coffee break

11.15

Using speechrate for word recognition in sub-optimal listening conditions.
Eva Reinisch

12.00

Cross-cultural categorical perception without words: The case of musical rhythm.
Nori Jacoby

12.45

poster session
Click here for the poster program.

14.15

How prenatal and postnatal language experience shapes neural oscillations in young infants.
Judit Gervain

15.00

Language acquisition, neural entrainment, phonological development and dyslexia.
Usha Goswami

15.45

coffee break

16.15

Conveying temporal information to the auditory system via non-invasive electric stimulation.
Lars Riecke

17.00

Subcortico-cortical circuity and time and rhythm perception.
Sonja Kotz

17.45

workshop closing
   

Registration

Registration is free of charge but compulsory if you wish to attend the workshop.

Poster session

The poster session will take place from 12.45-14.15 on the first floor landing of the MPI.

Click here for the poster program.

Organizers

This R3 workshop is organized by the TEMPOS research group, headed by Hans Rutger Bosker.
Contact: HansRutger.Bosker [at] mpi.nl (HansRutger[dot]Bosker[at]mpi[dot]nl)

Location

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.