Mariapaola D’Imperio’s talk at RuCCS: Talk at The impact of cognitive and indexical variability in the use of prosodic cues in meaning processing
Busch Campus, Psych 105Abstract: Speech production and perception are characterized by a great deal of variability, depending on factors such as contextual information and individual differences. Among possible sources of individual variability, socio-indexical information (such as gender, regional origin, social values and attitudes) has been extensively studied in the last two decades, especially in the realm of speech production. Individual cognitive variability in speech processing has only been quite recently uncovered, though mainly for segmental processing. In this talk I will report on recent studies in which socio-pragmatic skills (i.e., empathic skills) and/or indexical information (i.e. exposure to non-native dialects) modulate the use of prosodic cues to the purpose of either resolving lexical ambiguity or in processing pragmatic meaning.