The Project
Acoustic reduction in European languages.
Winner
Dr Mirjam Theresia Constantia Ernestus
Center for Language Studies
Radboud University Nijmegen
Nijmegen 6525 HT
The Netherlands
http://www.ru.nl/cls
Dr Mirjam Ernestus, 37, is a renowned scholar who has been published in some of the best international journals in the field of linguistics and psycholinguistics. She gained her BA and MA in General linguistics, cum laude, from the Free University Amsterdam, and has since 2000 pursued her postdoctorate studies at the Max Planck Institute for Psyholinguistics in Nijmegen, where she has extensive experience in PhD supervision.
Provisional Award
€ 1,250,000
Project Description
In spontaneous conversational speech, words are often pronounced much shorter than their citation forms suggest. Thus, English ‘ordinary’ may be pronounced as ‘onry’, Dutch ‘eigenlijk’ (actually) as ‘eik’, and German ‘mit bunten Papierschlangen’ (with colored paper-streamers) as ‘rnibbumpmpapierschtang’.
Even though acoustic reduction is an important phenomenon of everyday speech. It has received little attention in the linguistic and psycholinguists literature. The only languages in which acoustic reduction has been investigated in some detail are Dutch, English and German. The comprehension of reduced words, which is easy for humans but highly problematic for automatic speech recognizers, has hardly been studied at all.
The overall aim of this project is to develop computational psycholinguistic* models of speech production and comprehension that account for the pronunciation variation in spontaneous conversational speech. Degree of reduction and processing complexity will be explained and predicted as a function of speakers’ articulatory constraints, speakers’ and listeners’ cognitive constraints, the phonological and morphological structure of the word, the fine phonetic detail in the acoustic signal, and the information in the context, while taking into account inter-speaker and inter-word variability.
This aim will be pursued by both deepening and broadening the research on acoustic reduction. The project will investigate in depth the roles of phonological and morphological structure, on the basis of two pairs of related non-Germanic languages (Estonian versus Finnish, and French versus Spanish), and of fine phonetic detail and contextual information, on the basis of Dutch, English and these same four languages. The research method will be three-pronged, combining quantitative corpus-based analyses with psycholinguists experimentation and computational modeling.
*Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language.
Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics.
Source: Wikipedia
