1. Testing phonological processing Katrin Skoruppa, PhD kskor@essex.ac.uk

2. Overview What can you test in phonetics/ phonology? What kind of equipment do you need? What kind of tasks can you use? An example in Praat

3. Phonetics/ Phonology Languages of the world differ in their… Sound categories – e.g. [θ] exists in English, but not in French Sound positioning/ sequencing (phonotactics) – e.g. [drva] is legal in Polish, but not in Spanish Sound alternations (phonological rules) – e.g. place assimilation in English: pem please Supra-segmental structure (stress, tones) – e.g. initial stress in English: WAter

4. Phonetics/ Phonology So far, not much work processing in “extreme” languages/ on ”exotic” phenomena Sound categories How do category boundaries look like in a language with a hundred sounds, such as Taa (Botswana)? Sound alternations (phonological rules) How abstract are lexical representations in languages with complex and opaque rules, such as Yawelmani (California)? Supra-segmental structure (stress, tones) How do Bantu speakers process complex tone sandhi?

5. Equipment needed All studies – Relatively quiet surroundings Production studies – Good portable recording device Perception studies – Laptop and headphones Stimulus creation – Speech synthesis (e.g. Praat) – Natural recordings in a sound-attenuated booth

6. Widely used tasks Identification Discrimination Word-picture matching Gating Word spotting EEG: Mismatch Negativity

7. Possible difficulties/ confounds Using a computer Orthography Lexicality Picture appropriateness Instructions/ terminology: same/ different

8. An example in Praat 1. Construct a synthetic ba-da continuum http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Sour ce-filter_synthesis_3__The_ba- da_continuum.html 2. Construct a simple discrimination experiment http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/manual/Expe rimentMFC_3_1__A_simple_discrimination_exp eriment.html

9. Further readings Discrimination experiments and signal theory: http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/facilities/ statistics/dprime.htm A nice cross-linguistic paper using gating: http://www.ling- phil.ox.ac.uk/files/people/mental_repr_lexical_f orm.pdf More on Praat synthesis and experiments: Praat manual