Music & Language Studies

Links to the journal Language and mention of the new planned supplement to this journal eLanguage, both published by the Linguistics Society of America, have been added to the Journals page.

Link to Linguistics Society of America has been added to the Societies page

Presentations subheading added.

“Hypothetical Universe” added under Presentations

New links added to Other Researchers page.

Links to the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, the Human Communications Group at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, and to Music Cognition at Eastman/University of Rochester have been added to the Where to Study page.

Call for venue host proposals for Speech Prosody 2008, and a link to Speech Prosody 2006 in Dresden, have been added.

[Update pending. Look for review of Kurowski, Blumstein, and Alexander (1996).]

What has been dubbed foreign accent syndrome was first described by Monrad-Krohn in 1947,¹ in which he presented the case of a woman who suffered a shrapnel wound in WWII, that damaged portions of the left hemisphere of her brain. Her ability to produce and comprehend language was mostly spared, except for the odd effect to her speech prosody that others perceived as a foreign accent. In that particular case, sounding German in Oslo just following WWII was not an easy thing.

What must be pointed out however is that no one ever has been reported in the neurological literature spontaneously, or as a result of head injury, to have begun speaking a foreign tongue. The term foreign accent syndrome, as well as some of the descriptions that have accompanied the term, is a bit of a misnomer, in that it implies the patients of FAS somehow acquire the accent of a particular foreign language. Rather, the perception of hearers is that the prosody is somehow off, leading them to entertain the theory that the speaker is non-native in the language. Read the rest of this entry »

Child-directed speech, polysemy, foreign accent syndrome, and priming have been added to the terminology page.

Polysemy is a term referring to items with multiple meanings, and the ambiguity these multiple meanings create. In language, this describes words that might be interpreted variably in different contexts.

There is a bug crawling on the screen.

The FBI placed a bug in the ambassador’s office.

Caution: these olives have been mechanically processed. The occasional pit may be present.

The trap consisted of branches and leaves, covering a large pit.

I love the colors of the trees in fall.

Be careful not to fall in.

The term could easily be applied as well to the nature of pivot chords in musical modulations. For instance, modulating from the key of c-minor to E-flat-major, one might find a g-minor triad serving as a pivot. The three notes g/b-flat/d are diatonic pitches in both keys. The chord is therefore ambiguous (or polysemous) since it could resolve in various ways. This musical resolution can be considered as similar to the semantic resolution or parsing that takes place in the mind of a language user.

Child-directed speech (CDS) is the speech of caregivers to infants and children. It is a particular speech register which is characterized by modifications to prosody, and simplifications in lexical and syntactic choices. It is unknown how widespread each of these features are, of to what extent this register is a universal feature of languages. Some cultures have been reported to lack such a register. However, it is likely that aspects of prosodic modification and the simplification of lexical and syntactic choices can be found, even in cultures where these features are subtle.

This register has been known by several names: motherse, infant-directed speech, baby talk.

It has been observed in psychological studies of lexical priming, that polysemous words (in English, “bug”, “pit”, “fall”) sometimes force a processing delay, as the mind entertains several meanings. It would be interesting to consider these polysemous words as pivots. In musical modulation, pivot chords often serve similarly ambiguous (polysemous) roles. They are valid (diatonic) chords in the two keys. It is their dual roles that permits them to serve as pivots. A study of polysemous words in discourse as serving such a modulating role, in with the polysemous nature of pivot chords in musical modulation, might be a fruitful avenue to pursue.

It has been noted that child-directed speech (CDS) is often characterized by higher pitch and wider pitch range. However, these features are not universal. In Mayan society for example it has been reported that child-directed speech is characterized by a low-whispery murmuring quality. What could explain this difference?

One factor that has been largely unconsidered is the influence of sound environment on the specific choices made by speakers. An empirically verifiable theory would be that for instance the sound environment of Mayan children is more characterized by sounds within the higher pitched range, thus leading caregivers to modify their vocalisms toward the lower (and whispery) ends. It is a question of perceptual salience. The child is naturally equipped with the ability to pick out the human voice from its surrounding (cf. Belin, et al., 2000), likely by means of timbre recognition. Auditory scene analysis permits the child’s mind to pick out these features. However, if the sound environment muddies the soundscape in a particular range of frequencies, caregivers will likely veer in a different direction in order to aid the child in isolating the voice from surrounding sounds.

Reduplication and use of diminutives is often noted in CDS. Various explanations have been proposed. However, one that has yet to gain prominence regards the value of extra syllables in permitting intonational variety and contrast. What do we gain, in English for example, in transforming dog into doggy; in Czech, by rendering chlapec into chlapeček? Are we not adding greater phonetic complexity? Shouldn’t this be more difficult for the child? But this is in line with Slobin’s proposition that morphemes are more easily acquired which contain more than one phoneme. Further, we can not discount the value of intonation as contributing to the signal. It can be observed in Taiwanese Mandarin, for instance, that CDS not only contains reduplication, but that the tone is modified as well. An example that was given to me was the word /gu/ (high level tone) meaning brother. The CDS version is often /gu-gu/ (with a low followed by a high tone). Thus there is modification not only in the reduplication, but also in the change in tone, which is not lexically or phonetically determined.