Susanne Gahl

Susanne Gahl of UC Berkeley will speak at the UCSD Linguistics Department Colloquium on October 25, 2010, at 2:00 pm in AP&M 4301.

Talker age and lexical determinants of speaking tempo

Current models of language production typically make the simplifying assumption that the adult language processing system is stable from young adulthood until the onset of age-related pathology. In this talk, I present evidence suggesting that fluctuations in spontaneous speaking tempo reflect language development during adulthood. A key observation is that talkers from different age groups differ not just in overall speaking tempo, but also in the determinants of speaking tempo, consistent with predictions of psycholinguistic models of lexical access and language development, e.g., e.g. Mortensen et al. (2006) and Gollan et al. (2008).

References:

Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., Cera, C., & Sandoval, T. C. (2008). More use almost always means a smaller frequency effect: Aging, bilingualism, and the weaker links hypothesis. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 787-814.

Mortensen, L., Meyer, A. S., & Humphreys, G. W. (2006). Age-related effects on speech production: A review. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21(1-3), 238-290.