Abstract for Adam Buchwald's talk

Representation and repair in phonetic processing: Evidence from aphasic speech
Adam Buchwald (New York University)
October 2, 2007 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Theories of spoken language production often distinguish among (at least) two levels of representation: a typically discrete level that encodes lexical contrast and a typically high-dimensional level that encodes articulatory detail. Many recent articulatory studies of speech errors produced by neurologically intact and neurologically impaired individuals have revealed that on-line processing errors often involve mistiming adjacent articulatory gestures or co-production of different gestures, with little evidence supporting a level of discrete representation.

This talk explores the distinction between these two levels of representation by examining complexity-driven sound structure repair. I will present articulatory and acoustic evidence for a level of processing which permits the insertion of a discrete unit -- schwa. The phonetic data come from a study of aphasic speaker, VBR, with impaired spoken production, who typically produces word-initial consonant clusters with schwa inserted between the two consonants (bleed -> buh-leed). Additional patterns in VBR's spoken productions will be examined which suggest that these errors arise at a level of processing that encodes structural (and not just articulatory) differences among apparently similar sequences. This result is taken as evidence that the repairs are instituted to reduce complexity, and that the notion of linguistic complexity is dependent on the nature of the representations that are active at the level where the repair occurs.