Language is one of the few cognitive faculties that most researchers still believe to be uniquely human (visit Kanzi and Alex for alternative views). It is thought of as the ability to use symbols or words to construct and understand an unlimited number of ever new messages by combining and analysing symbol sequences based on a limited set of rules called grammar.
Research in our lab focuses on how words are stored in the mental lexicon and how the meaning of these words is retrieved and integrated during ongoing language processing. Of particular interest here is the role of speech melody, also referred to as prosody. This aspect of language has been neglected for some time although it supports a variety of linguistic functions. For example, consider the two different meanings of the utterance “That was good!” when spoken with a positive or negative tone of voice. Furthermore, English comprises a couple of words (e.g., “content”) that differ in meaning depending on where speakers place the stress. While the use of prosody to change the emotional meaning of an utterance largely compares across languages, differences exist in the use of prosody at the lexical level.
Recent work in our lab investigated the use of prosody in Cantonese, a Chinese dialect spoken in the southern Chinese provinces Guangdong and Guangxi, as well as in Hong Kong. Cantonese comprises six prosody patterns or lexical tones that speakers use to differentiate between otherwise identical words. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) study we contradicted the previously formulated assumption that word processing relies more on phonemic information (i.e., consonants and vowels) than on lexical tone. Moreover, ERPs show comparable time course and processing effort for words that differ from the most expected word in phonemic information, lexical tone or both.
Other questions of interest include when in time listeners integrate prosodically conveyed emotional information into ongoing language processing and whether this differs as a function of attention to prosody or inter-individual variables such as gender, language and cultural background. Furthermore, we are interested in understanding language related disorders such as autism or dyslexia.
If you would like to contribute to this research as a participant, research assistant or collaborator please contact Annett Schirmer. For interest in dyslexia, please direct your inquiry to Trevor Penney.
