Psycholinguistics talk – Overath

Acoustic and Linguistic Processing of Temporal Speech Structure

Tobias Overath, Assistant Professor, Duke University

Speech perception entails the transformation of the acoustic wave-form to linguistic representations. The nature of this acousto-linguistic transformation – where and how the acoustic properties of the speech signal are extracted in the human auditory system, where and how they interface with linguistic representations – is still not fully understood. I will present data from fMRI and EEG studies in my lab that allow the explicit dissociation of acoustic analyses and linguistic analyses by comparing the same acoustic manipulation (temporal speech structure via ‘speech quilting’; Overath et al., 2015) in two languages (native, foreign).