Language Lunch: Dr. Khalil Iskarous

The CRLMB Language Lunch is an informal, academic-community seminar on speech and language research. Please join us at noon on October 6th as Khalil Iskarous, (Ph.D), visiting Fullbright Distinguished Chair from Haskins Labs, presents "Perception of Articulatory Dynamics from Acoustic Signatures."

Abstract:

A long-standing debate in speech research has been whether the objects of speech perception are articulatory or acoustic in nature. Experiments form both sides of the debate, auditorist and gesturalist, use the same basic experimental technique: manipulation of parameters of synthetic or natural acoustic stimuli followed by perceptual tasks or brain-based measurements. Auditorists conclude that the differences between acoustic stimuli by themselves are sufficient to explain categorization, whereas gesturalists conclude that the perceptual system must refer to the articulatory system. This work introduces a new paradigm, where the perceptual stimuli are generated by an articulatory, rather than an acoustic, synthesizer. This allows for the investigation of whether articulatory trajectories are resolvable by the perceptual system, and what acoustic signatures can be used to decode articulatory dynamics.