Our guest speaker this week is Professor Catherine Best of MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney. Her presentation is titled "How strict is the Mother Tongue? Native-language and native-dialect effects on speech perception."

Abstract: The classic wisdom is that adults’ experience with their native language leads to substantial difficulties with categorizing and discriminating non-native phonological contrasts in speech, and that infants shift from an early universal sensitivity for all speech contrasts to a decline in discrimination of non-native ones before their first birthday. Subsequent research in my lab and elsewhere, however, has uncovered a richer picture of experience-related effects on speech perception, revealing that listeners’ responses to non-native speech are affected not only by the abstract phonological properties of their native language, but also by its gradient surface phonetic details, i.e., within-category phonetic patterning. The talk will provide a brief overview of those more nuanced findings in the context of the theoretical model developed to account for them, the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM). It will then go on to describe more recent findings with adults and young children that characterize the interplay of phonological and phonetic influences in perception, including both cross-language comparisons, and cross-dialect effects on word recognition within the listener’s language.

When: Wednesday 17 October, 2007
Time: 4:00 pm
Where: Room 1015, 10th Floor, Mathews Building

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