Home > Events > LangSci Lunch Talk: Kasia Hitczenko (LING)
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LangSci Lunch Talk: Kasia Hitczenko (LING)

Time: 
Thursday, April 14, 2016 - 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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How do listeners adapt to accented speech? Modeling accent adaptation

Listeners adapt to novel accents quickly and effortlessly. Various hypotheses have been put forth about how people deal with unfamiliar speech, and, specifically, how they update their sound category representations in response to it. On the one hand, it has been suggested that listeners ‘expand’ their sound categories when exposed to a novel accent, meaning they generally allow more variability in how a particular sound can be pronounced. This is contrasted with a strategy in which listeners ‘shift’ their categories, meaning they only accept variability in the direction of the accent they hear. Most of the findings to date have supported category expansion, with the key exception of Maye et al. (2008), who argued in favor of a shifting strategy. In this work, we apply a computational model of adaptation from Kleinschmidt & Jaeger (2015) to the Maye et al. (2008) results to reexamine what conclusions can be drawn from them. We compare three models of adaptation: one in which category representations are shifted, one in which they are expanded, and one in which they are both shifted and expanded. We show that strategies involving category expansion can explain the results equally well, if not better, than a category shifting strategy, in contrast to what has been previously concluded from these data.

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