How Strict is the Mother Tongue? Using Dialects to Probe Early Speech Perception and Word Recognition. This project will 1)advance knowledge of toddler word representations and their developmental precursors; 2) contribute to theories of phonological vs phonetic properties of spoken language; 3) explain how experience with the ambient language shapes children's phonological and lexical development. Moreover, the findings will 4) offer crucial new insights into sources of developmental disorders ....How Strict is the Mother Tongue? Using Dialects to Probe Early Speech Perception and Word Recognition. This project will 1)advance knowledge of toddler word representations and their developmental precursors; 2) contribute to theories of phonological vs phonetic properties of spoken language; 3) explain how experience with the ambient language shapes children's phonological and lexical development. Moreover, the findings will 4) offer crucial new insights into sources of developmental disorders (language delay, dyslexia) leading to improved early diagnosis and treatment; 5) bear on issues of second language learning; and by understanding the process by which young learners handle dialect variability, 6) provide insights into how automatic speech recognition systems can be made more robust to dialectal and foreign accent differences.
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Development of second language phonetic and phonological categories. The majority of the world's population speaks two or more languages, yet we know little about how multiple languages are accommodated within a single speaker. Why do children appear to learn a second language 'like a native' but adults invariably develop a clearly perceptible foreign accent? This project investigates a little-known fact - adult second language speakers also 'hear' with a foreign accent. As Australia becomes inc ....Development of second language phonetic and phonological categories. The majority of the world's population speaks two or more languages, yet we know little about how multiple languages are accommodated within a single speaker. Why do children appear to learn a second language 'like a native' but adults invariably develop a clearly perceptible foreign accent? This project investigates a little-known fact - adult second language speakers also 'hear' with a foreign accent. As Australia becomes increasingly multilingual increasing our understanding of the human capacity for language learning would strengthen Australia's social and economic fabric by leading to improved educational practices, work prospects for migrants and, most importantly, understanding between cultures.Read moreRead less
The social dynamics of language: a study of phonological variation and change in West Australian English. This project studies the role of pronunciation as a marker of individual and community identity. As the first systematic study of accent variability in Perth, it focusses on how, across different contexts, speakers from older and younger generations and different backgrounds deploy speech as a means of projecting social affiliation and difference.
Illuminating the Language-specific and Physiological Motor-control Influences on Children's Production of Lexical Stress. Great progress has been made in understanding the production of individual speech sounds but much less is known about the production of prosody. Lexical stress is a type of prosody that reflects the contrast between strong and weak syllables within single words. The ability to achieve this contrastivity shows a protracted developmental trajectory in healthy children and is at ....Illuminating the Language-specific and Physiological Motor-control Influences on Children's Production of Lexical Stress. Great progress has been made in understanding the production of individual speech sounds but much less is known about the production of prosody. Lexical stress is a type of prosody that reflects the contrast between strong and weak syllables within single words. The ability to achieve this contrastivity shows a protracted developmental trajectory in healthy children and is atypical in some children with autism. How these developmental influences relate to language-specific versus physiological motor-control factors is unknown. This project will address this critical research problem via innovative acoustic investigations. Outcomes will trigger the next generation of speech production models with potential for impact in areas like speech pathology.Read moreRead less
Discovering the developmental trajectory of lexical stress production. In English words some syllables are more strongly stressed than others. Most children will learn to emphasise these syllables appropriately but some will not. This project will help to understand the normal development of this vital aspect of speech production and allow more effective assistance to those who experience difficulties.
Children's generalisation and adaptation to unfamiliar regional accents reveal the path of early word learning. This project will use accent variation to probe how normal children, and those with language difficulties (dyslexia and autism), handle the complementary skills of word distinctiveness and word constancy. It will provide important new insights for theories of language development, as well as for early diagnosis and intervention for children with language delays.
Understanding the sounds of Australia's Indigenous languages. Our perception of sounds in a non-native language is strongly influenced by our native language background, yet knowledge of minority and endangered language sounds is almost entirely based on the perceptions of European and Asian language speakers. This project will provide the first large-scale acoustic analyses of Australia's Indigenous languages.
The effects of sentence structure on consonant and vowel articulations. Whilst machine-generated speech is generally of good quality at the level of the single word, it is noticeably less natural-sounding at the level of the sentence. This project examines an important aspect of the naturalness of human speech, namely, the effect that sentence structure has on individual consonants and vowels. A break-down of this naturalness is seen in some speakers who have suffered traumatic brain injury: suc ....The effects of sentence structure on consonant and vowel articulations. Whilst machine-generated speech is generally of good quality at the level of the single word, it is noticeably less natural-sounding at the level of the sentence. This project examines an important aspect of the naturalness of human speech, namely, the effect that sentence structure has on individual consonants and vowels. A break-down of this naturalness is seen in some speakers who have suffered traumatic brain injury: such speakers perform well when asked to utter a short word, but struggle when asked to produce a longer string of sounds. A better understanding of the interaction between speech sounds and sentence structure will lead to improvements in the treatment of speech disorders, and in the quality of human-machine communication.Read moreRead less
Voice, indexicality and the mediation of diversity on Australian television. Multicultural Australia is a country of many voices, although concern has been expressed about the under-representation of those voices in the media. This project investigates how the voices of minority groups are represented on mainstream Australian television, when they do appear. It examines a substantial body of TV data, from four types of programming: news, sports, advertising and drama. It focuses on minority ethn ....Voice, indexicality and the mediation of diversity on Australian television. Multicultural Australia is a country of many voices, although concern has been expressed about the under-representation of those voices in the media. This project investigates how the voices of minority groups are represented on mainstream Australian television, when they do appear. It examines a substantial body of TV data, from four types of programming: news, sports, advertising and drama. It focuses on minority ethnic voices and on voices linked to different social classes. Close analysis of media processes will be supplemented by consulting professionals and TV viewers. The findings will provide a new perspective on the media’s role in promoting or curtailing cultural literacy and linguistic diversity.Read moreRead less
Phonological effects on the development of inflectional morphology. This project investigates the mechanisms underlying typically developing children's variable omission of inflectional morphemes (for example, plural, past tense). The results will have significant implications for the evaluation and design of interventions for language-delayed populations where serious problems of communication persist.