Collabobrators
University of Agder
Department of Foreign Languages and Translation: Allison Wetterlin and Linda Wheeldon
University of Oxford, UK
Centre for Linguistics and Philology: Aditi Lahiri
Radboud University, NL
Centre for Language Studies: Paula Fikkert
Summary
Human skill in processing spoken language is unparallelled in the animal kingdom and is yet to be matched by any artificial system. Despite decades of research, there remains much to discover about the representations and processes underpinning this skill. Our focus is on phonology — sounds and sound structures — of morphemes and words, which governs language comprehension and production, in both spoken and written modalities. Within a single language the shapes of words can vary considerably in production. This variation then has to be resolved and decoded by the listener to make it comprehensible. Although variation in speech is fundamental to all languages, it is not an instance of ‘everything goes’. Production and comprehension for all native speakers are constrained not only by the underlying phonological representations of individual words but also by their cognisance. This project explores the fundamental interaction of phonological representations with cognisance, and their relationship to script. We will investigate the role of these factors in synchronic variation and language processing, first and second language acquisition, and language change.