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Testing phonological processing

Testing phonological processing. Katrin Skoruppa, PhD kskor@essex.ac.uk. Overview. What can you test in phonetics/ phonology? What kind of equipment do you need? What kind of tasks can you use? An example in Praat. Phonetics/ Phonology. Languages of the world differ in their…

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Testing phonological processing

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  1. Testing phonological processing Katrin Skoruppa, PhD kskor@essex.ac.uk

  2. Overview • What can you test in phonetics/ phonology? • What kind of equipment do you need? • What kind of tasks can you use? • An example in Praat

  3. Phonetics/ Phonology Languages of the world differ in their… • Sound categories • e.g. [θ] exists in English, but not in French • Sound positioning/ sequencing (phonotactics) • e.g. [drva] is legal in Polish, but not in Spanish • Sound alternations (phonological rules) • e.g. place assimilation in English: pem please • Supra-segmental structure (stress, tones) • e.g. initial stress in English: WAter

  4. Phonetics/ Phonology So far, not much work processing in “extreme” languages/ on ”exotic” phenomena • Sound categories How do category boundaries look like in a language with a hundred sounds, such as Taa (Botswana)? • Sound alternations (phonological rules) How abstract are lexical representations in languages with complex and opaque rules, such as Yawelmani (California)? • Supra-segmental structure (stress, tones) How do Bantu speakers process complex tone sandhi?

  5. Equipment needed • All studies • Relatively quiet surroundings • Production studies • Good portable recording device • Perception studies • Laptop and headphones • Stimulus creation • Speech synthesis (e.g. Praat) • Natural recordings in a sound-attenuated booth

  6. Widely used tasks • Identification • Discrimination • Word-picture matching • Gating • Word spotting • EEG: Mismatch Negativity

  7. Possible difficulties/ confounds • Using a computer • Orthography • Lexicality • Picture appropriateness • Instructions/ terminology: same/ different

  8. An example in Praat 1. Construct a synthetic ba-da continuum http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Source-filter_synthesis_3__The_ba-da_continuum.html 2. Construct a simple discrimination experiment http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/ExperimentMFC_3_1__A_simple_discrimination_experiment.html

  9. Further readings • Discrimination experiments and signal theory: http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/facilities/statistics/dprime.htm • A nice cross-linguistic paper using gating: http://www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/files/people/mental_repr_lexical_form.pdf • More on Praat synthesis and experiments: Praat manual

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