Marta Ortega-Llebaria is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Ortega-Llebaria’s research is experimental and it centers on suprasegmental aspects of speech, such as prosody and rhythm. She has studied the intonation of Catalan, Spanish, Rumanian and English, especially the perception and production of stress and accent. She also investigates the acquisition of prosody in a second language.
One debated question in models of word recognition and sentence processing is that of information flow. While there is consensus that there is an interaction between high-level and low-level information, and that this interaction constitutes a main trait of the general architecture of most processing models, the debate centers on the detail of this interaction. How autonomous is low-level from high-level information? Can high-level information change decisions based on low-level information, or the effect of high-level information is only a bias on a decision based exclusively on low-level information? How effectively does a general model of listening handle the interplay between universal and language-specific speech traits?
In this talk, the above debate has been extended to the processing of prosody. Prosody has not yet been included in models of sentence processing and word recognition, and this study constitutes an initial exploration on this issue. In particular, we examine the perception of word stress in English and in Spanish in words embedded in different sentence intonations. The hypothesis investigates whether expectations based on the subjects’ knowledge of sentence intonation (high-level information) affect perception of word-stress (low-level information), and if it does, which mechanisms can explain this interaction.
