Dr Tamara Rathcke, Lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of English Language & Linguistics, will be presenting at the Speech Science Forum at University College London (UCL) today, Thursday 22 March 2018, with a talk entitled ‘Speaking or Singing? On the Origins of the ‘Speech-to-Song’ Illusion’.
Listeners usually have no difficulties telling the difference between speech and song (S2S). Yet when a spoken sentence is repeated several times, listeners frequently report a perceptual transformation from speech to song. The transformed perception is accompanied by a change in the involved neural circuits that process spoken vs. musical signals. There are, however, large differences in the perception of S2S. They seem to arise primarily from the acoustic properties of the spoken phrases that are looped to create S2S. Our previous work has shed some light on these properties, and left open questions about the role of the phonological factors, like the degree of the sentence sonority and its length.
Moreover, much variability in S2S perception arises from the individual listener experience. S2S has been observed in musicians and non-musicians, though the musicality itself is likely to increase the likelihood of S2S too. It is unclear if and how the general individual differences in cognitive processing styles and previous linguistic experience of the listener may also shape the S2S perception. In her talk, Tamara will draw on both previous and on-going collaborative research to clarify some of the open questions surrounding this fascinating perceptual transformation.
The talk will take place at UCL’s Speech Hearing and Phonetic Sciences department in London. For more details of the Speech Science Forum, please see the page here: www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/speech-hearing-and-phonetic-sciences/speech-science-forum