Linguistics Department Colloquium:

Sarah Bakst (Postdoctoral Researcher, Waisman Center, UW-Madison)

Target practice: self-monitoring in L1 and L2 speech production (with Caroline A. Niziolek)

We listen to ourselves while speaking to ensure that we say what we intended to say and how we intended to say it. In a native language, this auditory feedback helps us correct nascent errors: by comparing our productions to auditory representations of our targets, we are able to automatically assess how well we have matched them. In a second language, a lack of production experience and weaker auditory targets may impede the ability to assess productions. Previous evidence from magnetoencephalography (MEG) (Niziolek et al. 2013) has shown that speakers can detect when they are straying from targets in their native language, and that they can use their auditory feedback to modify their vowel formant trajectories while talking. In this MEG study we examine differences in how L2 speakers of French detect and correct natural variability in their own speech while producing both newly-acquired phonetic categories as well as their own native English categories.