Marking prosodic prominence for voice assistant and human addressees.

Prosodic prominence (realized with phonetic features such as increased intensity, duration, and pitch, among others) is thought to guide listeners' attention by focusing new information. This study investigates production and perception of prosodic prominence toward two types of addressees: a human and a voice assistant interlocutor. We examine how the language system adapts to this increasingly common technology, by testing whether prosodic prominence is subject to when addressing an interlocutor that is consistently rated as having less communicative ability.

Do disfluencies increase with age? Evidence from a sequential corpus study of disfluencies.

Speech disfluencies such as repeated words and pauses provide information about the cognitive systems underlying speech production. Understanding whether older age leads to changes in speech fluency can therefore help characterize the robustness of these systems over the life span. Older adults have been assumed to be more disfluent, but current evidence is minimal and contradictory.

Cortical Tracking of Speech: Toward Collaboration between the Fields of Signal and Sentence Processing.

In recent years, a growing number of studies have used cortical tracking methods to investigate auditory language processing. Although most studies that employ cortical tracking stem from the field of auditory signal processing, this approach should also be of interest to psycholinguistics-particularly the subfield of sentence processing-given its potential to provide insight into dynamic language comprehension processes. However, there has been limited collaboration between these fields, which we suggest is partly because of differences in theoretical background and methodological constraints, some mutually exclusive.

The Temporal Prediction of Stress in Speech and Its Relation to Musical Beat Perception.

While rhythmic expectancies are thought to be at the base of beat perception in music, the extent to which stress patterns in speech are similarly represented and predicted during on-line language comprehension is debated. The temporal prediction of stress may be advantageous to speech processing, as stress patterns aid segmentation and mark new information in utterances. However, while linguistic stress patterns may be organized into hierarchical metrical structures similarly to musical meter, they do not typically present the same degree of periodicity.