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A1 - Neurobiology of the vowel space

PI and Ko-PI: Prof. Dr. Scharinger und Prof. Dr. Jansen

Research context

Assumptions about speech sound representations usually imply an abstraction from speaker-related variation. Results from the first cohort of the Research Training Group, however, indicate that aside from acoustic-phonetic information, so-called »meta«- or »paralinguistic« information (e.g., age and sex) is equally anchored in those representations and play a crucial role during speech sound- and vowel processing. In this vein, the current dissertation project will ask how »categorical« paralinguistic information should be conceived of. Which aspects of the signal allow for a categorical interpretation, where does a rather gradient interpretation prevail? 
The dissertation project in A1 seeks to attract students with an interdisciplinary interest in Phonetics, Sociophonetics, Phonology, and Neurophonetics. Individual projects in A1 enable the combination of phonetic and sociolinguistic research (based on e.g., speech corpora) with neuro-scientific methods (e.g., electroencephalography [EEG] or functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI]).

Possible topics:

• Categoricity in speech sounds and speakers.
• How, when and where is acoustic-phonetic variance processed in the vowel system? Neurobiological evidence.
• Dynamics of representations: Non-binary contrasts.