Speech and Language Processing: How Words Emerge and Dissolve

The Research Focus "Speech and Language Processing: How Words Emerge and Dissolve" is concerned with how the sounds of speech are acquired by infants and young children in first language acquisition, how such acquisition stabilizes in healthy individuals, and how such patterns may dissolve following the onset of brain lesions. Spoken language is a defining human behaviour, and it is the very basis of our interaction with the environment as well as of our identity as individuals. For this reason, it is important to understand both how this faculty emerges during child development and the highly damaging effect that speech disorders have on so many aspects of life. Error patterns when language is learnt and when it unravels in speech disorders also provide a unique window to the mind, and are of prime importance for our emerging understanding of how linguistic diversity arises, how languages change, and how physiology and cognition interact to form the sound patterns of human language. Yet speech acquisition and disorders remain poorly understood because they are usually investigated separately from basic research on speech production and perception in healthy individuals. One of our principal objectives is to overcome this divide by inviting leading scientists from different disciplinary backgrounds to consider how to develop unified models of child speech acquisition, of the mature speech production and perception system, and of speech disorders. We intend to lay the foundations for a comprehensive research program in which modern experimental phonetic thinking hooks up with neurobiological and clinical reasoning, while embracing linguistic diversity.

Spokespersons

• PD Dr. Marianne Pouplier
  (Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, LMU)
• Prof. Dr. Jonathan Harrington
  (Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, LMU)

Advisory Board

• Prof. Dr. Kai Bötzel
  (Dept. of Neurology, LMU)
• Prof. Dr. Adrian Danek
  (Dept. of Neurology, LMU)
• Prof. Dr. Sonja Greven
  (Department of Statistics, LMU)
• Prof. Dr. Stephan Hartmann
  (Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and the Study of Religion, LMU and Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU)
• PD Dr. Eva Reinisch
  (Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, LMU)
• Prof. Dr. Claudia Maria Riehl
  (Chair of German as a Foreign Language, LMU)
• Prof. Dr. Thomas Schenk
  (Clinical Neuropsychology, LMU)
• Prof. Dr. Hinrich Schütze
  (Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU)
• Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schweier
  (Institute of Slavonic Philology, LMU)
• Prof. Dr. Guido Seiler
  (Chair of German Linguistics, LMU)
• Prof. Dr. Beate Sodian
  (Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, LMU)
• Prof. Dr. Wolfram Ziegler
  (Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, LMU)

Visiting Fellows

• Prof. Khalil Iskarous, Ph.D.
  (USC Dornsife)
• Prof. Lucie Ménard, Ph.D.
  (Université du Québec in Montreal (UQAM))
• Prof. Dr. Josef Rauschecker
  (Georgetown University)
• Prof. Georgia Zellou, Ph.D.
  (UC Davis)

Events

• Lecture Series in Summer Semester 2015 – "The Birth and Decay of Language"
• International Workshop – "How Words Emerge and Dissolve: Evidence from Speech Production, Speech Perception, Acquisition and Disorders"
  (Summer Semester 2016 )
• International Conference – "Abstraction, Diversity, and Speech Dynamics"
  (Summer Semester 2017)

CAS^Video – Veranstaltungsmitschnitte

Please find video recordings of this Research Focus here: CAS^Video – Language: Birth and Decay.

Press

• Speech and Language Processing: How Words Emerge and Dissolve, in: CAS Concepts 4 (2017).