2020.09.10 Dr. Christophe Coupé

Assistant Professor

Undergraduate Coordinator

The University of Hong Kong

Profile

Carrying Information with Speech

A primary manifestation of language is our use of sounds to communicate with each other, i.e., the exchange of information in the acoustic domain. What are the rules which govern how information is carried with speech? In this presentation, we will report two studies related to this question. The first investigation will highlight the existence of a universal trade-off between speech rate and information density, and suggest underlying cognitive constraints. The second will look at how phonetic features, segments, tones and syllables are used to build lexicons, and show that the task to differentiate between words is distributed very unevenly among these sound structures.