Lap-Ching Keung on Wednesday

Lap-Ching Keung is giving a talk this week in our Brown Bag (Wednesday, Tobin 521B, 12-1:15). The title of his talk is "Effects of Discourse Status and Planning Difficulty on Acoustic Variation".

His abstract is:

Repeated words within a discourse tend to be acoustically reduced. This variation can be explained by a pragmatic selection rule (discourse status) or by speaker facilitation (planning difficulty). For this experiment, we ask whether these effects are part of the same cognitive system or different systems. Participants saw an array of four objects and described a sequence of two movements like, "The chiddle moved above the hamel. The *cammer moved above the neeken." The *target?s discourse status and planning difficulty were manipulated. Durations were longer for new vs. given and novel vs. familiar, which replicated findings from previous research. More importantly, at the target noun, there was a trend towards an interaction. Givenness had a greater effect on novel targets. Although not significant, onset latency patterned in the same way as target duration, showing a correlation between the two factors. These results together suggest that discourse status is partially mediated by planning difficulty, which further suggests that the two effects are operating from the same cognitive system.