SEMINAR ABSTRACT
Speech unfolds in time in a linear fashion carrying information of various types. While syntax conveys information about grammatical relations in an abstract manner, prosody is encoded in the acoustic signal delineating the chunks that make up utterances. Although prosody and syntax are structurally different, it has long been suggested that (i) syntax drives prosodic structure in speech production, and (ii) prosodic information supports syntactic processing in language comprehension. To test this, two experiments were conducted. Experiment I was a controlled reading task of utterances with variable word order. Experiment II tested sentence comprehension of the same type of utterances. Formal language theory (Chomsky hierarchy) predicts crossing non-adjacent dependencies to be challenging to process as they show non-isomorphy between their syntactic linearisation and their semantics. Swiss German provides a unique test case for the neural underpinnings of syntax because it exhibits both crossed and nested dependencies by varying word orders in sentence-final verb complexes (keeping compositional semantics unchanged). In Experiment II the parsing of crossed and nested dependencies was tested using a prosodic manipulation while simultaneously recording with an electroencephalograph. Auditory presentation of natural and prosodically degraded speech probed the potential facilitative effect of prosodic boundaries for syntactic comprehension. This talk presents results of an acoustic examination of the intonational structure in sentences as well as behavioural and neurophysiological results during sentence processing. The role of syntax in shaping prosody and the role of prosody in processing syntax will be discussed.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Catalina is a language scientist. She is a postdoctoral researcher in the Distributional Linguistics Lab at the University of Zurich. Her research deals with word and phrase level prosody in the field of prosodic typology and neurolinguistics. She's particularly interested in how speakers chunk and highlight elements in the speech stream and how this interacts with other linguistic domains e.g., syntax. Catalina have worked on a variety of language families ranging from Indo-European to Oceanic over to Australian languages, more recently expanding to Otomanguean. She obtained her PhD in the Phonetics Laboratory at the University of Melbourne. During her doctorate she also worked at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. Her dissertation provides a detailed account of prominence marking and phrasing phenomena of Lifou French (a variety spoken in New Caledonia) and Drehu [d͡ʒehu], an Oceanic language from the South Pacific. Working for the company Appen Limited, Catalina gained experience in the area of language and technology. In her role as linguist lead, she used to coordinate linguistics projects in NLU and NLP.
ABOUT THE SEMINAR SERIES
In this event in a series, speakers from within the Hub, the University, and the broader research community tell us about their research. Our Research Seminar Series involves speakers covering a broad range of themes surrounding our Hub’s interests, so we’ll hopefully all learn something interesting. Whether you want to learn to inform your own research or to simply satisfy a personal curiosity, we hope to see you there.