Lecture | SMILE Talks
From INsight to inSIGHT: Understanding prosodic adaptation in speech perception
- Date
- Friday 7 November 2025
- Time
- Series
- SMILE - Experimental Linguistics series
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 1.78
Abstract
Talkers vary in how they speak, which leads to acoustic variability in segments (consonants and vowels) and in prosody (e.g., lexical stress, lexical tones). In turn, the task for listeners is to correctly perceive speech from different talkers regardless of this variability. This talk focusses on how listeners deal with acoustic variability in lexical stress. First, I will present data that illustrates how exactly talkers vary in their lexical stress production. Second, I will present a series of experiments that show how listeners deal with this variability through perceptual learning. The presented results highlight how between-talker variability in prosody challenges speech perception and how listeners manage to solve these challenges. Finally, I will discuss future directions and open questions that aim at identifying the cognitive mechanisms involved in prosodic adaptation.