Home > Events > LangSci Lunch Talk: Eric Pelzl (SLA)

LangSci Lunch Talk: Eric Pelzl (SLA)

Time: 
Thursday, September 24, 2015 - 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM
Location: 
St. Mary's Multipurpose Room (STM 0105)

Food and ideas bring people together.  Our weekly lunch talk series provides students and faculty with the opportunity to present their in-progress work to a supportive, interdisciplinary audience.

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The role of accent in the processing of spoken Mandarin

Accent plays a strong role in shaping listeners’ expectations about a speaker’s utterances. Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies suggest that native listeners' expectations regarding morphosyntactic errors (gender mismatching) and pronunciation errors (full for reduced vowels) can be shaped by a speaker’s accent such that neural responses to errors might be attenuated when the errors are made by non-native (or non-local) accented speakers. I will present a recently completed ERP experiment extending this line of inquiry to accented speech in Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin provides an interesting test of the role of accent because it has two easily separable types oflexical cues: segmental (consonant/vowel) and suprasegmental (tone). Results will be shared and possible interpretations considered. #whatareP600