Prof Aditi Lahiri Seminar

Date: Monday, 29th July 2019, 11.30am-12.30pm
Venue: Room 3.610, Level 3, Australian Hearing Hub, Macquarie University
Speaker: Professor Aditi Lahiri, Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, Language and Brain Lab,
University of Oxford
Host: Distinguished Professor Katherine Demuth
Topic:  What you think you hear may not be what has been said: Processing alternatives and asymmetry

Abstract
A speaker-listener relationship is fraught with difficulties. The listener has no influence over a speaker’s utterances which could be as variable as they please. Nevertheless, language comprehension amidst native speakers seem straightforward in normal conversation. Models of speech perception and word recognition vary considerably in their assumptions about how words are represented in the mental lexicon, how much detail is stored, and how the speech signal is mapped on to the lexicon. Since languages are replete with both phonological and morphological asymmetries, assuming asymmetric representation which in turn affect processing and change appear not to be unreasonable. In this presentation, we will provide evidence from language change as well as from a series of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments on German, English, and Bengali in support of abstract and asymmetric representations.

Bio
Aditi Lahiri FBA, is a Statutory Professor of Linguistics and the Director of the Language and Brain Laboratory at the University of Oxford. She received her first PhD from the University of Calcutta and the second from Brown University. After short stints of teaching at UCLA and UC Santa Cruz, she spent a number of years at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen after which she was appointed as the Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Konstanz. Her research involves theoretical phonology (synchronic and diachronic) as well as psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, both of which address phonological and morphophonological issues.