Humanities Faculty Spotlight:

Linguistics Professor Receives Major Grant from National Institutes of Health

Linguistics Professor Shari Speer was awarded a $1,115,625 grant from the National Institutes of Health for her project "Intonation in Spontaneous English and Japanese Dialogue." The objective of Professor Speer´s five-year project is to understand the role of intonation in spoken language production and comprehension during everyday conversation.

With previous support from the National Science Foundation, Professor Speer and her colleagues—Kiwako Ito, a linguistics postdoctoral researcher, and Donna Byron, assistant professor of computer science and engineering—have developed a novel methodology that allows collection of multiple tokens of like utterances from the same speaker in varying intonational conditions. To understand how listeners respond in conversation, they use head-mounted eye-movement monitoring, an implicit measure of comprehension that allows the listener to speak and move while looking at the objects described by a conversational partner.

The new NIH grant will enable them to conduct identical experiments on speakers of Japanese and English, two languages that differ substantially in their syntax and intonation, in order to test whether intonation is used differently in languages that provide melodic cues in different physical forms and with differing degrees of reliability. Understanding how speakers and listeners make use of intonation is an essential step in drawing the complete picture of human cognitive function during bidirectional oral communication.

Ideally, Professor Speer’s intonation project will lead to a more accurate model of spoken language production and comprehension, thus providing a more specific base for multiple future engineering and clinical applications. The integration of knowledge about intonational and discourse structure is used to increase the sophistication of speech identification and generation systems in artificial intelligence, human-machine communication devices, language education devices, and communication devices for language-impaired populations. Because patients with memory, hearing, and speech disabilities have been shown to rely on intonation more than normal during language comprehension, specification of intonation-discourse structure links can improve speech- and language-therapeutic practice. Indeed, efficacy research with cochlear implant patients has documented the need for improved transmission of prosodic information. The confirmation of a link between intonational cues and eye movements may also contribute to the enhancement of navigation technology.