By Dr. Angela Cooper, April 24, 2018, 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm

Department of Linguistics and Languages will host a series of research talks in the next two weeks. Dr. Angela Copper from University of Toronto is the first speaker, and she will present the diversity and adversity in speech perception. Understanding spoken language involves matching the acoustic input onto linguistic representations, a process complicated by considerable differences between speakers and contexts. How do listeners accommodate this variation? In this talk, Dr. Cooper will present several lines of research addressing this question. She will discuss her work examining first and second language listeners’ ability to adapt to accented speech and the phonetic adjustment mechanisms that may underlie these processes. Additionally, Dr. Cooper will present work on the influence of indexical and noise variation on speech processing and its implications for the nature of our stored representations.Together, this research sheds light on how linguistic and non-linguistic information shape listeners’ ability to accommodate and adapt to diversity in the real world.