Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Adriana Hanulikova

Successful language comprehension entails the encoding of linguistic as well as non-linguistic information, including social, physical or psychological markers of a speaker. Listeners usually need only a short exposure to spoken language to find out whether a speaker ist male or female, old or young, or whether the speaker comes from a specific cultural background and speaks a foreign accent, a dialect or a standard variety. Despite a large number of linguistic studies of these variables, the neurocognitive mechanisms of how listeners model speaker's producition based on her/his look or on their social and cultural background in ways that affect language comprehension in general and different levels of linguistic representation in particular continue to remain poorly understood. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of recent research related to this topic.