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Program

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Keynotes (click to view/hide abstract)

• Friday, 16th May 2025, 9.00–10.00am: Caicai Zhang, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
  

  Variation in real-time lexical tone processing: A psycholinguistic perspective

  Variation is ubiquitous in human speech. A speech sound has different acoustic realizations when produced by different speakers or surrounded by different speech sounds, posing a challenge for fast and consistent speech perception in the listener’s brain. Beyond acoustic variation, there are systematic phonological alternations, where the context-specific phonological form must be selected in a super-fast manner prior to articulation in the speaker’s mind. However, how variation is accommodated in speech perception or planned in speech production is not well understood. In this talk, I will focus on variation on a short timescale, i.e., a few hundred milliseconds of real-time speech perception and production, probed via the lens of a highly variable phonological entity – lexical tone. I will present evidence showing that listeners deploy multiple cues, including contextual acoustic cues, population F0 knowledge, and their own vocal F0 cues, to achieve fast and accurate tone perception, especially when the stimuli are variable, ambiguous, or acoustically degraded. On the production side, our studies on Mandarin Third Tone sandhi show that speakers encode the abstract tonal category at an earlier phonological encoding stage and the surface, context-specific tonal form at a later phonetic encoding or motor preparation stage before articulation. These neural processes appear to be largely similar across lexicality (real vs. pseudowords) and word frequency (high vs. low frequency) conditions. These findings have implications for advancing speech perception and production theories. Psycholinguistic methods are instrumental in understanding basic mental processes in real-time lexical tone processing, highlighting that the human speech system is fast, flexible, and multi-pronged.

• Friday, 16th May 2025, 3.00–4.00pm: Petra Wagner, Bielefeld University
  

  Structured variation in cross-modal coordination: insights from prosody production and perception

  It is a long established fact that the expression of prosodic events is not restricted to fundamental frequency, but encompasses a myriad of cues, including but not limited to intensity, voice quality, duration and articulatory precision. In the last decades, further evidence showed that the expression of prosody is not even restricted to the modality of speech, but can extend to facial expressions, head and body movements as well as gesticulations (e.g., gesture strokes). To this day, we do not have reached a consensus on how the interaction of these multiple cues is organized in production, and how listeners integrate these many -highly variable- cues in perception.
  
  In my talk, I will address the degrees of freedom, variation and synchronization of prosody-related events in cross-modal production, and discuss how listeners may follow different strategies in cue integration. Lastly, I will suggest an interaction model, which relies on prosodic structure for cross-modal anchoring and coordination, thereby increasing the robustness of communication.

• Saturday, 17th May 2025, 9.00–10.00am: Sharon Rose, University of California San Diego
  

  Musical pitch perception by speakers of African tone languages

  Speaking a tone language is reported to confer benefits in processing pitch in music (Pfordresher & Brown 2009; Wong et al. 2012; Hutka et al. 2015, among others). Yet, almost all research in this domain has tested speakers of East Asian languages, namely Mandarin, Cantonese, and Vietnamese, where the effect appears to be robust. African languages make up a large percentage of the tone languages spoken in the world, but are underrepresented in cognitive science research, particularly in this domain. Two previous studies address whether speakers of African tone languages also have a musical pitch processing advantage. Bradley (2016) tested fifteen speakers of Yorùbá and reported that both Mandarin and Yorùbá speakers are more sensitive to interval and contour musical pitch processing than English speakers. However, Creel, Obiri-Yeboah & Rose (2023) demonstrate that this ability is not universal among tone language speakers; 80 speakers of Akan, a language of Ghana, do not show the advantage with respect to interval processing. Akan has two level tones, and no contour tones, whereas Yorùbá has three level tones, and the East Asian languages tested have four or more tones, most of which are contours. In this talk, I will present follow-up research to the Creel et al (2023) study and explore i) the properties of tone systems that might confer better musical pitch processing, including number and type of tones, and ii) what musical cultural factors may impact results. Over forty speakers each of two Niger-Congo languages, Yorùbá (Nigeria), and Baatonum (Benin) participated in the same experiment as the Akan participants. Baatonum has four level tones, making it an ideal comparison to Mandarin, which also has four tones. We will report on whether the number and type of tones affects performance on the task. In addition, in prior studies, participants with musical training typically outperform those with no musical training (Bidelman et al 2013). However, musical training in a West African context must be assessed differently. In particular, speech surrogate systems, in which the tones of language are played on musical instruments such as the talking drum, are part of the cultures of all African groups tested, but its prevalence and cultural embedding varies. We will explore the possible impact of understanding talking drums on the results.
  
  Joint research with Samuel Akinbo, Samuel Asitanga, Sarah Creel, Micheal Obiri-Yeboah and Yaya Yadoma.

• Sunday, 18th May 2025, 10.40–11.40am: Simon Roessig, University of York
  

  The dynamical approach to intonation: why and how?

  Dynamical systems have proven to be successful and powerful in describing a wide variety of natural phenomena and are attracting increasing attention in linguistics and phonetics. They also offer interesting perspectives for modelling intonation – primarily due to three properties: First, dynamical descriptions capture the evolution of states over time, highlighting the importance of temporal aspects in representations. Second, the interplay of continuity and discreteness is at the core of dynamics, offering promising solutions for the integration of phonetics and phonology. Third, in dynamical systems, a clear notion of noise and variability exists, making them potentially well suited for capturing the ubiquitous multiplicity of prosodic data. While dynamical approaches to intonation have been explored for some time, the development of more explicit computational models has accelerated in recent years. In this talk, I will outline fundamental properties of the dynamical approach, review significant advancements in the field, and discuss challenges and future directions.