This PhD studentship, fully funded by the Bloomsbury Colleges, will examine the effects of language background on perceptual strategies. Languages can differ in the roles played by different acoustic dimensions. For example, in tone languages such as Mandarin, pitch is a vital cue to the meaning of words, but it plays a more secondary role in non-tonal languages such as English. Recent work from our laboratory has shown that Mandarin speakers place more importance on pitch and less importance on duration compared to English speakers when categorizing both linguistic phrase boundaries and musical beats, and that Mandarin speakers have difficulty ignoring pitch and attending to other acoustic dimensions. These findings suggest that learning a first language can change the salience of different perceptual dimensions, colouring the strategies developed as individuals learn new categories.
This project will use EEG and behavioural techniques to investigate the relationship between language background, cue weighting during auditory categorization, and dimensional salience, and to test whether Mandarin speakers can be trained to direct their attention away from pitch and towards other, more relevant acoustic dimensions during English speech perception.
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