Priority Programme Announcement
Phonological and phonetic competence:
between grammar, signal processing, and neural activity
The aim of the Schwerpunktprogramm (≈ Research Focus Program) is to further our knowledge of the human cognitive, articulatory and perceptual abilities of speech. The research stands between the sound systems established in phonology, the results about articulation, perception, and acquisition in phonetics and psycholinguistics, and the neural correlates of speech processing investigated in neurolinguistics.
Relevant background is constituted by
- new theoretical approaches between these disciplines, in particular theories that make predictions about the summation of individual occurrences of utterances and the cognitive reality to which these connect (Exemplar Theory, Probabilistic Linguistics), the minimization of articulatory and perceptual effort in understanding phonological patterns and in modelling phonetic observations like coarticulation (Dispersion Theory, Functional Phonology), constraint-based theories in phonology and their functional foundation, as well as theories about the temporal and quantitative phonetic mapping of tones in intonation;
- the possibility of applying new methods, in particular articulatory measurements such as Electropalatography (EPG), Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA), and Laryngography; neurophysiological methods like Electroencephalography (EEG), Magnetencephalography (MEG), and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI); new methods with spoken corpora; and the creative application of acoustic measurements to new questions.
Questions to be investigated concern in particular
- mental lexical entries: their relation to the articulatory reality and to the acoustic-perceptual recognition of the lexical entries, the question of their discrete or summary-acoustic-perceptual nature, and questions of the formation of mental lexical entries during language acquisition;
- sounds and sound classes (phonological features), as well as the phonological changes they undergo: their correlates in articulation, perception, and in linguistically relevant areas of the cortex;
- prosodic constituents (syllable, foot, prosodic word, phonological phrase, intonation phrase, prosodic utterance) as well as the stress corresponding to these: their articulatory consequences, role in perception, neurological correlates, role in language acquisition and interaction with syntax.
- tones in intonation: their acoustic consequences in dependency of prosodic constituents and stress, as well as their perception in relation, for example, to the perception of segments or to the perception of tones in tone languages.
Contributions to the Schwerpunktprogramm are empircal investigations, which (a) orient themselves with phonological theory insofar they either contribute empircially to the cognitive, articulatory, or acoustic-perceptual consequences of elements of phonology (discrete mental lexical entries, sounds, features, prosodic constituents), or, inversely, are designed to demonstrate the limits of the usefulness of these abstractions in explaining cognitive, articulatory or acoustic-perceptual phenomena and pursue alternative conceptions. The contributions should (b) substantially connect to results of phonetics, psycholinguistics and/or neurolinguistics. There is in particular also an expectation for contributions that put phonological theory formation in an empirically testable relation to cognitive, articulatory or perceptual observations. Investigations from historical linguistics and typological linguistics are welcome insofar they go beyond questions of historical change and typological spread and supply a direct contribution to the synchronous competence-oriented questions of the Schwerpunktprogramm.
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