Past events: Mirjam Ernestus. Rhythm in speech production and in the actual speech signal

What: Rhythm in speech production and in the actual speech signal

Where: BCBL Auditorium and Auditorium zoom room (If you would like to attend to this meeting reserve at info@bcbl.eu)

Who: Professor Mirjam Ernestus, PhD, Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

When:  Thursday,  Oct 10th at 12:00 PM noon.

Previous literature suggests that brain oscillations correlate with the properties of the speech signal,  and, therefore, that rhythm is an important aspect of human speech comprehension and production. In this talk, I will discuss the question to what extent this holds for everyday speech, which is known to be temporally very variable. I will show that the assumptions in the seminal article by Giraud and Poeppel (2012) appear not to match well with the properties of everyday speech. This raises the question of the role of rhythm, and of brain oscillations, in speech comprehension. In addition, I will show that, simultaneously, also in everyday speech, speakers tend to avoid stress clashes, by adapting the number of syllables in a word. Rhythm may therefore play a role in the production of everyday speech. These data not only shed light on the role of rhythm and brain oscillations but also show that it is relevant to study everyday speech to understand actual speech behavior.