WA Friday lectures, May 17, 1.30 p.m., room 601A - talks by Dr Joanna Śmiecińska and Dr Karolina Rataj

Depending on the type of task and the testing methods, prosody development has been shown to either match the general linguistic development, and be related to SLI, or to be relatively independent from these conditions. The paper reports on a study on passive prosodic skills of 89 Polish children based on computer generated (CG) material. We used text-to-speech software (IVONA) to create CG speech samples of popular Polish nursery rhymes. Compared to similar samples of recorded human (RH) speech, the CG ones had distorted rhythm, less emotional and less natural intonation (with generally correct nuclear stress, placement – “grammatical” prosody), occasional segment duration problems (concatenation points). These prosodic distortions were not very salient, but distinctive enough to make the recognition task trivial for grown-ups (95% average correctness).
We hypothesised that children with poorly developed language (detected, among others, by a sentence repetition and non-word repetition tasks) would also fair poorly on the task of distinguishing between CG and RH speech, as opposed to the children with well developed linguistic skills, who, we predicted, would score similarly to the adults. What we found, instead, was a developmental pattern.
The study (still in progress) seems to suggest that "non-grammatical” prosody competence measured by computer generated speech recognition ability is unrelated to general linguistic competence and is subject to developmental changes.

Researching metaphor can be approached from various perspectives. Results of psycholinguistic studies offer insights into how various types of metaphoric and literal utterances are comprehended during online tasks. This talk will be devoted to the findings of event-related potential (ERP) studies on metaphor comprehension, which allow researchers to draw conclusions not only about the time within which metaphoric utterances are recognized and comprehended, but also about specific brain responses observed in relation to such stimuli. This neurophysiological perspective offers yet another way of looking at metaphors, which can broaden our understanding of many aspects related to figurative language comprehension.