Eleonora Beier

University of California, Davis | UCD · Department of Psychology

Prosodic prominence (realized with phonetic features such as increased intensity, duration, and pitch, among others) is thought to guide listeners’ attention by focusing new information. This study investigates production and perception of prosodic prominence toward two types of addressees: a human and a voice assistant interlocutor. We examine how...

In this chapter, we discuss research from behavior, event-related brain potentials, and neural oscillations which suggests that cognitive and neural constraints affect the timing of speech processing and language comprehension. Some of these constraints may even manifest as rhythmic patterns in linguistic behavior. We discuss two types of constrain...

Prosodic prominence (through increased pitch, intensity, duration) is thought to guide listeners’ attention to new information, which relies on the assumption that a rational listener will benefit from these prosodic cues. This study investigates production and perception of prosodic focus marking toward two types of addresses: a human and a voice...

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis that can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time....

Speech disfluencies such as repeated words and pauses provide information about the cognitive systems underlying speech production. Understanding whether older age leads to changes in speech fluency can therefore help characterize the robustness of these systems over the life span. Older adults have been assumed to be more disfluent, but current ev...

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis which can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time...

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis which can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time...

We report the results of a replication attempt of a foundational study by Cutler and Fodor (1979). This study sparked several lines of research into the role of information structure in language comprehension, based on the proposal that discourse characteristics, prosodic focus, and syntactic focusing constructions may all guide the comprehender’s...

In recent years, a growing number of studies have used cortical tracking methods to investigate auditory language processing. Although most studies that employ cortical tracking stem from the field of auditory signal processing, this approach should also be of interest to psycholinguistics—particularly the subfield of sentence processing—given its...

While listeners can infer the mood expressed by the music of a different culture, the question of whether strong felt emotional responses can also be induced cross-culturally remains unanswered. We address this question by measuring chill responses, sudden increases in emotional arousal, through self-report and skin conductance measures. Excerpts o...

While rhythmic expectancies are thought to be at the base of beat perception in music, the extent to which stress patterns in speech are similarly represented and predicted during on-line language comprehension is debated. The temporal prediction of stress may be advantageous to speech processing, as stress patterns aid segmentation and mark new in...