Presented By: Department of Linguistics
Prosody Discussion Group
Mairym Lloréns Monteserín, USC: "Co-speech vocal tics produced by adults with Tourette syndrome are sensitive to prosodic structure"
The Prosody Group consists of researchers interested in any aspect of prosody. The group meets biweekly throughout the year to present work in progress, read papers, and practice for upcoming presentations. Please join us if this sounds interesting to you!
Meetings this semester will be virtual. For Zoom access information, or to be added to the Prosody discussion group list, please email:
prosody-contact@umich.edu
On Friday, October 29, Mairym Lloréns Monteserín of the University of Southern California will present "Co-speech vocal tics produced by adults with Tourette syndrome are sensitive to prosodic structure."
ABSTRACT
Speech planning and production takes place in a body beset by urges. An urge to x is a sensation of discomfort that worsens until x is performed. It is common for talkers to experience urges to cough/yawn/etc. while they are speaking but very little is known about how these two fundamentally different modes of control over vocal behavior interact. My research is currently focused on understanding if and how urge-based systems that have the potential to wrest control over vocal-respiratory articulators are coordinated with co-occurring speech at different time-scales/levels of prosodic hierarchy. The vocal tics produced by adults living with the neurological condition Tourette syndrome provide a unique opportunity to investigate this topic because they occur frequently. Vocal tic noises, words and phrases are produced in order to satisfy an urge and they are completely unrelated to a ticcer-talker's linguistic and communicative goals. For my dissertation, I collected a corpus of acoustic recordings of adults performing a battery of speech tasks while ticcing freely, that is, while refraining from suppressing their own tics. By removing the need for active suppression, tic and speech motor systems are free to coordinate or compete in a naturalistic fashion. In this talk I will present an analysis of the relationship between prosodic structure and the timing of co-speech tic events. The distribution of tic events shows that tics are sensitive to prosodic structure at the level of intonational phrases (at least). I interpret these results to suggest that a higher-level task coordinates tic utterances with phrase boundaries. Implications for our understanding of speech planning in light of such “meta-prosody” are discussed.
Meetings this semester will be virtual. For Zoom access information, or to be added to the Prosody discussion group list, please email:
prosody-contact@umich.edu
On Friday, October 29, Mairym Lloréns Monteserín of the University of Southern California will present "Co-speech vocal tics produced by adults with Tourette syndrome are sensitive to prosodic structure."
ABSTRACT
Speech planning and production takes place in a body beset by urges. An urge to x is a sensation of discomfort that worsens until x is performed. It is common for talkers to experience urges to cough/yawn/etc. while they are speaking but very little is known about how these two fundamentally different modes of control over vocal behavior interact. My research is currently focused on understanding if and how urge-based systems that have the potential to wrest control over vocal-respiratory articulators are coordinated with co-occurring speech at different time-scales/levels of prosodic hierarchy. The vocal tics produced by adults living with the neurological condition Tourette syndrome provide a unique opportunity to investigate this topic because they occur frequently. Vocal tic noises, words and phrases are produced in order to satisfy an urge and they are completely unrelated to a ticcer-talker's linguistic and communicative goals. For my dissertation, I collected a corpus of acoustic recordings of adults performing a battery of speech tasks while ticcing freely, that is, while refraining from suppressing their own tics. By removing the need for active suppression, tic and speech motor systems are free to coordinate or compete in a naturalistic fashion. In this talk I will present an analysis of the relationship between prosodic structure and the timing of co-speech tic events. The distribution of tic events shows that tics are sensitive to prosodic structure at the level of intonational phrases (at least). I interpret these results to suggest that a higher-level task coordinates tic utterances with phrase boundaries. Implications for our understanding of speech planning in light of such “meta-prosody” are discussed.
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