Talk by Jason Bishop, Wednesday – November 13th, 4-6 PM

Abstract:

Evidence from a wide range of phonetic and phonological patterns suggests that speech production planning unfolds in relatively large chunks—chunks that are better defined in terms of phrase-level prosodic units (Keating & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2002) than in terms of one-or-two-word sequences (Levelt, et al., 1999). More recently, research in phonetics and psycholinguistics has begun to explore the extent to which planning might be flexible (Wagner et al., 2010; Krivokapić, 2012), that is, that planning scope is sensitive to both speaker-external (e.g. speaking conditions) and speaker-internal (e.g. cognitive limitations) factors. In this talk, I present data from a large-scale production study that bear on the role of a speaker-internal factor, namely working memory capacity (WMC). In particular, I argue that patterns of prosodic variation in these data are systematically related to individual differences in speakers’ WMC in a way that is difficult to explain unless it is assumed that speech production at the level of phonological encoding both (a) unfolds in phrase-sized chunks, and (b) exploits different levels of the prosodic hierarchy depending in part on speaker-specific processing needs. Implications for modeling prosodic interfaces will be discussed, as will implications for phonological theory more generally.