LSA 124: Prosody and language comprehension

Delphine Dahan | session 1 | TuTh 8:30 – 10:15, 106 Moffitt Hall

Speech comprehension is a process that involves identifying the words intended by the speaker, determining the structural relationships between these words, as well as deriving the information structure of the utterance — what the speaker considers given, presupposed by the listener and what is new, added information. The prosody of the utterance is affected by each of these aspects simultaneously. The question that the course will address is how listeners may utilize the acoustic correlates of the utterance's prosodic structure to recover the different linguistic structures that constrained it. The course will focus on the psycholinguistic work that has addressed this issue, the approach and underlying assumptions that it has entertained, as well as the various methodologies that researchers have adopted to examine this issue.

Reading: Selected materials available online.

Areas of linguistics: Language development and psycholinguistics; Phonetics, phonology, and morphology