| Speaker | Meg Cychosz |
| Affiliaton(s) | University of Maryland |
| Date | 04.04.2022, 4:00 pm |
| Time | 16:00 o'clock |
| Venue | Virtual: Please send an e-mail to zas.xtalks@leibniz-zas.de to get the Zoom invitation link. To be let in, use your proper name. |
The speech stream is highly variable and context-dependent. This talk will explore how speakers, especially children, comprehend and reproduce this variable speech over the lifespan—processes that can lead to historical language change. I will focus on two groups of young children learning language in unique environments: children with cochlear implants and children in a community undergoing language shift from Quechua to Spanish in Bolivia. I will examine how these children learn to reproduce phonetic patterns despite variable input stemming from their unique language learning environments. In doing so, I will illustrate how children can drive, and forestall, phonetic change in language, shaping phonological typology. Overall, the talk will view phonetic and phonological acquisition through the lens of multiple learning environments to inform linguistic theory.
Meg Cychosz is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences and the Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing at the University of Maryland. Meg received her PhD in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in August of 2020. Her research focuses on the evolution of speech variation both within individual speakers and within communities including such topics as children’s mastery of complex phonetic pattern, encoding of phonetic variation across different languages, and the effects of sensory experience on speech patterning.