L.008.32160 Speech Perception and Evaluation

Lehrende: Prof. Dr. Christian Langstrof

Veranstaltungsart: Masterseminar

Orga-Einheit: Anglistik/Amerikanistik

Anzeige im Stundenplan:

Semesterwochenstunden: 2

Unterrichtssprache: Englisch

Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 20

Kommentar:
The vast majority of courses in linguistics focus on the speaker – how is language produced, what are its structures, how does it map onto social facts, etc. This class will look at what goes into peoples’ ears and further downstream into peoples’ heads – that is, we will highlight the role of the listener and the activity of listening as well as look into what people think they hear (which may or may not be a particularly faithful analogue of the speech signal as a measurable entitity).
The seminar will break down into three overarching themes:

1. The physiology of speech perception – How are acoustic signals processed from “the inner ear upward“?

2. Cognitive processing and representations of speech – What factors play a role in processing and storing auditory data, and how do those factors contribute to cognitive representations?

3. Social evaluation – How do people evaluate and “rate“ speakers according to the kind of speech they use in conjunction with other transparent social facts associated with the speaker?

Although some aspects of this class can be viewed as rather theoretical, we will also adopt a hands-on approach on speech perception through designing and running mini-experiments on various aspects of the topic, which will eventually also be part of the assessment (qT and PL).