Laura Dilley
Michigan State University

Laura Dilley

Michigan State University
United States

Language understanding, prosody, and segments: role of the predictive brain

The past half century of linguistic research has seen dramatic changes in the way researchers frame and conceptualize language as a human capacity. In this talk I will present a synthesis of insights from recent decades and argue that language is the outgrowth of perception, action, and cognition. Language perception does not entail mere recovery of abstract linguistic units; instead, social and ecological contexts shape how linguistic units are understood to be composed, and how meanings are apprehended.

Prosody has long been held to be a mere overlay on implicitly foundational segmental underpinnings of sentences. Contrasting with this view, I will present an overview of experimental work from my lab which shows that, perhaps surprisingly, distal context prosody can alter perception of lexical and segmental content, as well as meaning. For example, changing only prosody in initial distal portions of utterances may cause listeners to hear a word string as ending, alternatively, with timer derby or tie murder bee, or a sentence to contain either saw a raccoon or else saw raccoons. Such traditionally unexpected findings highlight the role of predictive brain mechanisms tuned to language-relevant timescales in apprehending – emergently – the meaning, form, and content. Arriving at new insights regarding such effects requires challenging some long-held assumptions about the synchronic relationship of prosody to words and meanings.

I argue that viewing linguistic capacities as grounded in temporal dynamics of social brains permits new insights into some of the most historically challenging linguistic problems, including perception of speech, apprehension of meaning, and ontology of language, while also fostering novel connections among linguistic sub-disciplines.