G.G.A. Severijnen (Giulio)

In everyday life, we engage in numerous conversations with different people on a daily basis. In order to perceive what your interlocutor is saying, we as listeners are faced with the task to analyze and interpret the acoustic speech signal to finally understand spoken words and sentences. What complicates this process is the large variability in the acoustic signal between different talkers. For example, differences in sex, age and dialects can shape the talker's acoustic realizations of what they are saying. This leads to differences in segmental information (consonants, vowels) and in suprasegmental information (lexical stress, prosodic focus). Still, despite this variability, listeners are able to almost effortlessly understand different talkers.

My PhD research focuses on studying cognitive mechanisms that listeners use to deal with this variability (in suprasegmental information) between different talkers. Using different approaches (behavioural, eye-tracking and EEG), I aim to find out how listeners exploit talker-specific information to optimize the process of speech perception regardless of the large variability between different talkers.

• Language and Communication

• Sound Learning