Nous accueillons à partir du 04 octobre 2019 le professeur Susanne Fuchs (Leibniz Centre General Linguistics – Berlin (Allemagne)) pour une série de quatre séminaires sur le thème « An embodied and situated perspective on speech and language ».
Ces séminaires se dérouleront les vendredis 04 et 11 octobre et 08 et 15 novembre de 16h00 à 18h00 à l’ILPGA, 19 rue des Bernardins 75005 Paris – Salle Rousselot.
Abstract
The general aim of this lecture
series is to open new avenues to empirically grounded linguistics by means of interdisciplinary
research within an embodied and situated perspective.
Lecture 1: Susanne Fuchs I : Changes and challenges in understanding speech variability: A review over half a century – vendredi 04 octobre 2019
Over the last century, our
understanding of variability in the speech signal has undergone a variety of
changes. Once regarded as noise in the signal, it has now become a major topic of
investigation revealing evidence for the underlying biological, cognitive and
social factors of speech. In this overview talk, I will review theories and
data discussing variability with respect to visible and audible biological factors
as well as structures and mechanisms beneath the surface. Furthermore, I will
review how our knowledge about variability and social factors has evolved from
long-term adaptations between different social groups to short term adaptations
regulating social behaviour. Finally, I will discuss how variability has been
treated with respect to the nature of linguistic representation: from a
phonemic level to a subphonemic one (fine phonetic detail), from abstract
representations to enriched multisensory representations stored in the episodic
memory. I will then summarize which challenges variability poses for theoretical
models and empirical linguistics.
Lecture 2: Susanne Fuchs II : The forgotten articulator: How respiration constrains linguistic structure and affects speech at a local and global level – vendredi 11 octobre 2019
In this lecture, I will talk about
respiration, a biological rhythm which is flexible and adaptable and crucially
involved in speech production, perception and face-to-face interactions. Based
on different experiments, I will discuss the interplay between respiration and
speech planning in read and spontaneous speech and the respiratory coordination
between interlocutors in dialogue. Finally, I will argue that respiration does
not only deliver the expiratory airstream for speech in long temporal windows
(interpausal units), but can also be involved in the production of prominent
syllables.
Lecture 3: Speech and language adaptations in the context of rhythmic body motions – vendredi 08 novembre 2019
ATTENTION : Séminaire annulé (fusionné avec la lecture 4)
In our daily life, speech
production is often part of another action, e.g. interlocutors walk and talk
next to each other. In this lecture, I will provide evidence from multimodal experiments
in which we investigated the effect of rhythmic motions with the legs or hands
on respiratory parameters, and the temporal structure of speech. This work will
open new avenues towards placing speech and language studies into a broader
situational context and more ecological settings.
Lecture 4: Susanne Fuchs IV : Two motor tasks within the same body: Timing and coordination of speech and manual gestures – vendredi 15 novembre 2019
Changement d’horaires : Le séminaire aura lieu de 14h à 17h.
Hand gestures and articulatory motions belong to two motor systems in
one body with different dynamic properties, in particular with regards to mass
and speed. Yet, both of them are often well timed and coordinated. In this
talk, I will introduce cross-linguistic experiments using motion capture and
acoustics where we investigated the speech-hand coordination in natural games
(counting out rhymes; shooting cans). The speech-hand coordination was
challenged by means of temporal pressure or by different positions of an object
in space.