SPP 1234:  Phonological and Phonetic Competence: Between Grammar, Signal Processing and Neural Activity

• Subject Area: Humanities
• Term: from 2006 to 2012
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 18181517

The Priority Programme contributes to the exploration of human cognitive, articulatory and perceptual abilities dealing with speech sounds. The investigations are at the interface of the sound systems investigated in phonology, the knowledge about articulation, perception, acquisition and processing established in phonetics and psycholinguistics, and the neural correlates of language processing investigated in neurolinguistics.
Points of departure are international approaches of the past decade to relate the results of these disciplines empirically and theoretically. The Priority Programme is to contribute to the clarification and development of different models of the relationships between the disciplines: from phonology, the phonetic grounding of phonological constraints and the theory of functional phonology; from phonetics, the very different exemplar theory and probabilistic linguistics. At the same time, neurophonological and neurophonetic experiments allow for new kinds of investigation of the mental categories that are postulated in linguistics and allow for modelling of the neural basis of these linguistic abilities.
Central topics of investigation are:
(1) entries in the mental lexicon - specified minimally in terms of categorical phonological information or instead a flexible phonetic imprint of the occurrences of a word that have been encountered,
(2) sounds and sound-changing processes - systemic and functional aspects,
(3) prosodic units like syllables and metrical feet, as well as the phonological phrases that are connected to syntactic units of the sentence - systemic-linguistics properties, processing and phonetic consequences,
(4) tones as building blocks of the sentence melody - their relation to the level of linguistic expressions on the one hand, their phonetic realisation (tonal height etc.) and perception on the other.
In addition to the creative use of familiar methods of the investigation of production and perception, modern methods like EEG, MEG and EPA are employed in the investigation of new aspects of these topics. In many cases these methods have not previously been applied to the questions investigated here.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• International Connection: United Kingdom

Projects

• A comparative study ofdownstep: downstep by phrases in German, downstep by focus in Mandarin Chinese, and downstep by tones in Yoruba. (Applicant Truckenbrodt, Ph.D., Hubert )
• A new window on intonational form and function (Applicant Braun, Bettina )
• Acoustic, articulatory and perceptual analyses of the post-vocalic voicing contrast in German. (Applicant Harrington, Jonathan )
• Adapting to phonological reduction: Tracking how learning from talker-specific episodes helps listeners recognize reduced speech (Applicant Mitterer, Holger )
• Articulatory cross-language study of initial consonant clusters in varying prosodic conditions (Applicant Hoole, Philip )
• Behavioral and neural correlates of vowel length in German and of its interaction with the tense/lax contrast (Applicant Hertrich, Ingo )
• Coordinating project for SPP 1234: organization of common activities of projects within this programme. (Applicant Wiese, Richard )
• Cross-language and individual differences in the production and perception of syllabic prominence. Rhythm-typology revisited. (Applicant Barry, William John )
• Development of prosodic competence in early first language acquisition: Behavioral and neurophysiological investigations (Applicants Höhle, Barbara ;  Truckenbrodt, Ph.D., Hubert ;  Wartenburger, Isabell )
• Edge marking in German compounds: Frequency effects and prosodic constituents (Applicant Auer, Peter )
• Exploring the interplay of segmental and suprasegmental information: Representation and processing of word stress (Applicant Heim, Stefan )
• Internal structure of phonetic representations: Non-linear analyses of error data from patients with apraxia of speech. (Applicant Ziegler, Wolfram )
• Multisensory plasticity of neuronal word form representations (Applicant Friedrich, Claudia )
• Neural and psychological correlates of phonological categories (Applicant Zwitserlood, Pienie )
• Neurolinguistic correlates in processing phonological stem-variants of complex words (Applicant Eulitz, Carsten )
• Occurrences, properties, and perception of reductions and deletions in spoken language and their impact for models of speech perception. (Applicant Reetz, Henning )
• Phonetic Perceptual Reference Space for Prosodic Phonological Categories (Applicant Möbius, Bernd )
• Pre-attentive phonotactic processing (Applicant Jacobsen, Thomas )
• Prosodic structure in audiovisual spoken word recognition (Applicant Jesse, Alexandra )
• Prosody in parsing (Applicant Kügler, Frank )
• The acquisition of voicing an vowel alternations in German (Applicant van de Vijver, Ruben )
• The emergence of cognitive vowel systems from articulatory-acoustic and perceptual vowel spaces. (Applicant Pompino-Marschall, Bernd )
• The syllable as a processing unit in speech production: Evidence from frequency effects on coarticulation (Applicant Möbius, Bernd )
• Tonal and Articulatory Marking of Information Structure: Kinematic and Acoustic Correlates of Accentuation in German (Applicant Grice, Martine )
• Word stress: rules and representations (Applicant Wiese, Richard )
• Zusammenhang zwischen oszillierender Hirnaktivität im Motorkontex und vokalischen und artikulatorischen Dynamik während der Sprachplanung (Applicant Davidson, Douglas )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Richard Wiese
• Deputies: Professor Dr. Grzegorz Dogil (†); Professor Hubert Truckenbrodt, Ph.D.