STIMOS

Syllables and the Timing of Speech

 Partecipanti

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'Project summary: The project develops an integrative symbolic-dynamical framework for gaining a fundamental understanding of the relation between qualitative spoken language form, also known as phonological form, and the continuous speech movements and acoustics in which this form is realized. The empirical domain is syllables. The syllable is a central unit of spoken language, mediating between lower-level properties of individual sounds and higher-level prosody. In its first aim, the proposed research develops modelling methods for rigorously evaluating the relation between theoretically posited syllabic parses and experimental data, from Arabic and English, acquired with the new 3D EMA device. In a second aim, formal analytical methods are developed for understanding the relation between posited abstract phonological organization and its measurable phonetic indices. Using a combined symbolic-dynamical approach, the analytical component fully embraces the task of relating continuous data and qualitative theory, a fundamental problem in present day cognitive science. As a consequence, the project enables a system-level, quantitative understanding of how categorical organizational principles of linguistic systems may be supported by or emerge from statistical properties of the lower-levels in which linguistic form is conveyed. The interdisciplinary theoretical, experimental and mathematical approach proposed here has not been attempted before for spoken language. The outcome would be a unified explanatory framework for linguistic competence, experimental data and statistics. The project’s significance and relevance to the “Ideas” program lies in the centrality of the core problem it addresses for the language and mind frontier. In linguistics and cognitive science, a fundamental challenge has been the lack of a formal substrate for dealing with the duality of the symbolic and the continuous. The development of an integrative framework for exploring the relation between qualitative phonological form and continuous data will open up new perspectives for researching both language and the human mind. In addition, the proposed research has significant potential long-term benefits for language development, impairment and reading. Because syllabic organization is language-specific and because we know that this organization conditions the timing of articulatory movements, syllables provide a key construct for studying the link between articulatory timing and linguistic ability in both healthy and patient populations.'