Do faces speak volumes? The role of talker identity in speech processing

Abstract 

The task of comprehending spoken language is notoriously challenging, because spoken language is highly variable. The sources of this variation are manifold and range from regional and non-native accents to the presence of incomplete utterances and variants that deviate in grammar from written sentences. Psycholinguists attempt to understand how listeners deal with such variation in speech comprehension, how they represent and store variants, and under what circumstances processing of variants may be enhanced or disrupted. In this talk, I will present behavioral and electrophysiological studies that examine the extent to which talker identity enhances or disrupts performance in tasks assessing speech comprehension and evaluation.

About Adriana Hanuliková 

Adriana Hanuliková received her PhD from Humboldt University and Max Plank Institute for Neurolinguistics in Nijmegen in 2008. She worked as a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and as a Marie Curie fellow at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language. Adriana Hanuliková is currently an assistant Professor, the head of the psycholinguistic lab at University of Freiburg and a fellow of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. Her research interests and topics are broad and include multilingualism, individual differences in language use and processing, and social aspects of language processing.