OVERVIEW
This link provides summaries of research conducted in the speech production and perception lab on how the brain perceives and processes suprasegmental acoustic features speech. Long-latency auditory evoked responses (AEPs) were recorded over regions of the temporal and parietal lobes of each hemisphere as subjects made linguistic decisions based on variations in intonation (changes in terminal rise in pitch) and contrastive stress patterns in auditory signals. In some studies, the suprasegmental features were embedded within linguistically meaningful utterances while others were embedded within tonal signals matched with the speech samples in duration, pitch, and loudness.

Three primary issues were addressed in each of the studies including: (1) What are the roles of the left and right hemispheres in processing linguistically relevant suprasegmental features of an utterance? (2) Are linguistically relevant suprasegmental features perceived categorically or continuously? and (3) Does the brain respond to suprasegmental features differently when presented in meaningful linguistic utterances versus nonlinguistic contexts (tonal signals)?

STUDIES
Recording and Analysis of Auditory Evoked Potentials

EPs to Terminal Rise in Pitch in Linguistic Utternaces

EPs to Terminal Rise in Pitch in Tonal Signals

EPs to Contrastive Stress in Phonemically Identical Word Pairs

EPs to Contrastic Stress in Tonal Signals

EPs to Terminal Rise in Pitch by Five-Year-Olds: Linguistic Utterances