LangSci Lunch Talk: Chris Heffner (NACS)

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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A Phonetic Category Learning Road Trip

Humans group speech sounds into categories.  The processes by which we do so are a topic up for debate.  My research along these lines has led me to embrace dual-system models of phonetic category learning, where listeners first attempt to use abstract, rule-based decision-making processes to categorize sounds, then, if necessary, fall back on the memorization of stimulus-to-category mappings.  We began testing these theories using a typical English-speaking undergraduate population, learning categories of German sounds.  In this presentation, I present data obtained, and experiments proposed, in populations different from these: in native German speakers in Tübingen, in kids who stutter in Michigan, and, hopefully soon, in a museum environment in Ohio.  These results, we believe, continue to support the adaptation of dual-system models of category learning to phonetic learning tasks.