Clayards in Linguistics, Friday 4/27 at 3:30

Meghan Clayards of McGill University will present “Flexibility and individual differences in speech perception” Friday April 27th in ILC N400 at 3:30. An abstract is below. All are welcome!

Abstract. In order to understand spoken words, listeners integrate information across multiple acoustic dimensions such as spectral frequencies and durations. For each phonological contrast (e.g. bet vs. bat) we must learn which dimensions are relevant and how much to pay attention to each dimension (cue weights). This talk will focus on two aspects of this process. First, flexibility in what we pay attention to in perception and how this is tied to production patterns. Secondly, despite consistent overall patterns for particular contrasts/languages, there seem to be important individual differences in how people perform in speech perception tasks. I will present some data from my lab that is beginning to explore these differences.