The emergence of social conventions in the categorization of speech sounds

PhD cosupervisors: Nicolas Claidière (laboratoire de Psychologie cognitive) and Noël Nguyen (laboratoire Parole et langage), with the participation of Leonardo Lancia (laboratoire de phonétique et phonologie, Univ Paris 3 & CNRS)

Abstract

In spoken language interactions, and for people to understand each other, speech sounds must be categorized consistently across listeners. Within a linguistic community, a common set of criteria must therefore be agreed upon, as regards how phonemic categories are delineated in the speech sound space. In spite of their central importance for social cognition and speech sciences, little attention has been devoted so far to the mechanisms that allow this shared perceptual landscape to emerge. The goal of this project will be to explore these mechanisms as they deploy within a group of participants, in an experimental framework.

The PhD student will contribute to devising an ensemble of innovative, joint-perception experiments, in which each listener's perceptual behavior can be affected by that of the other listeners. This will consist, for example, in having groups of listeners construct a mapping between unfamiliar speech sounds and sets of entities (e.g., visual shapes) in a coordinated way, within an experimental set-up that will make it possible for information to flow between listeners. Issues of interest will include the impact of local, pairwise interactions on the dynamics of the entire group, the geometry of the shared speech sound space and how it evolves over the course of the interactions between listeners, the potential benefit of performing a speech perception task collectively rather than individually.

To a very large extent, these issues remain unexplored in the speech perception domain. However, fruitful connections can be made with related, albeit different lines of work, which are concerned with cultural transmission in both humans and non-human species (Claidière, Smith, Kirby & Fagot, 2014) and with experimental approaches to the emergence and evolution of language (e.g. Kirby et al., 2008, Xu et al, 2013). In this project, a bridge will be established between these different domains, which will allow the PhD candidate to exploit the experimental methods and mathematical tools developed in studies on cultural transmission, to further our understanding of how speech perception works, and how it contributes to the evolution of phonological systems.

For more information:

Nicolas Claidière’s website: http://www.nicolas.claidiere.fr/

Noël Nguyen’s webpage: https://cv.archives-ouvertes.fr/noel-nguyen

Leonardo Lancia’s list of publications: http://lpp.in2p3.fr/Publications-776