Carol Fowler - US grants

When two people converse both are almost always in motion. As a speaker's posture shifts, the listener's does too, and the two together become coordinated with the speaker's speech rhythms. We don't always notice but this kind of social coordination happens all the time. People coordinate the movements of their bodies, even in the awkward social situation of a laboratory experiment. Movements are subtly and unintentionally synchronized as in an unconscious dance. This dance is important and is associated with mental health. It breaks down with psychological dysfunctions such as schizophrenia, autism and even marital dissatisfaction. Thus a fundamental science of social synchronization would broadly impact our understanding of social concerns and further advance the possibilities for therapy.
With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Richard Schmidt and Dr. Carol Fowler will advance our understanding of the perceptual and cognitive processes that support social interactions, the processes that allow synchronization of movements in natural interactions. Past research by these scientists and others suggests general dynamical principles that underlie interpersonal coordination. These previous studies established that talking with another person or seeing the other person's movements provide the coupling mediums, the bases for coordination. The funded research will investigate how the mind and body interact to organize this coordination. The new experiments put people together to solve problems and then track how the shared problem solving-the degree of psychological coordination-contributes to movement coordination. Subtle movements to maintain posture as well as overt rhythmic movements are recorded for analysis using modern mathematical tools of nonlinear dynamics. Different experiments contrast movements of limbs, torso, and other parts of the body, competitive vs. cooperative tasks, natural vs. rhythmic speaking, and how much can be seen of another's person's movements.

Language users typically have the impression that understanding speech in their native tongue is instantaneous and effortless. This apparent ease belies a vastly complex chain of processes that must be engaged in order to derive meaning from the acoustic patterns of speech. Unlike computer speech recognition systems, human listeners adapt quickly to tremendous acoustic variability in the speech signal. This extremes of this variability can result, for instance, from unusual acoustic environments, new voices or accents, very fast speaking rates, and many other factors. Speech is one of the most difficult perceptual challenges that humans face, so research on its underlying mechanisms will not only further our understanding of human language, but may also help to unlock some of the deepest mysteries about the human mind. This basic knowledge may also serve to improve current speech technologies, and current methods of remediation for impairments in speech comprehension and production.

With the support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Magnuson is studying a speech perception phenomenon called "compensation for coarticulation" with the goal of refining current theories of speech perception. Compensation for coarticulation is a phenomenon whereby the perception of a sound is affected by the qualities of preceding or following sounds. Traditional explanations of this phenomenon appeal to active mechanisms of perceptual adjustment based on physical properties of the vocal tract and speech articulators. However, there are now three distinct explanations that account for overlapping subsets of results, each of which follows from a different theory of speech perception. Dr. Magnuson and his research team will use acoustic analyses and speech experiments with human speakers and listeners in order to distinguish between these differing explanations of compensation for coarticulation. The results of this project promise to advance our general understanding of the perceptual mechanisms that underlie speech and potentially many sensory experiences.

It has been estimated that five to nine percent of school-aged children are diagnosed with dyslexia, and even adult skilled readers can experience debilitating reading impairments as a result of brain injury or disease. Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the perceptual or cognitive dysfunctions that may underlie dyslexia, but one that has been particularly influential over the past thirty years or so is the phonological deficit hypothesis. This hypothesis states that reading deficits can often be linked to underlying problems in the way that the sound system of a reader's language is represented and processed in the brain. However, new evidence from genetics and brain imaging has come to light in recent years, and new phonological theories have been developed. With support of the National Science Foundation, a satellite conference will be held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading to critically examine the phonological deficit hypothesis in light of new theory and evidence. An international group of leaders in the field will discuss whether the hypothesis has stood the test of time, and how it might change as research continues to advance our understanding of reading deficits.

Project Overview

This award funds a three-day conference that is planned for June 2014 at the University of Connecticut. The conference will bring together a distinguished group of researchers from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to share their theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of language as a socially and physically situated interaction that is public, meaning observable and accountable. The conference will offer three full days with presentations, posters, and discussions. There will be a pre-conference workshop intended to introduce graduate students to pioneering work on language that will be unfamiliar to most. The conference is entitled: "Finding Common Ground: Social, Ecological, and Cognitive Perspectives on Language Use."

Intellectual Merit

Dramatic developments across an array of disciplines and theoretical perspectives in the past decade are challenging influential views of language as private, individual, biological, and designed for thinking. These developments have generally emerged largely independently of each other, and researchers with similar concerns often do not know of each other's work. These new methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding language are exciting and promising, but they have yet to achieve the coordination and collaboration necessary to lead to major changes in how most scientists and scholars view language. This conference will enable various researchers to engage in face-to-face conversations in order to develop an appreciation for other theoretical approaches and methods that can amplify and strengthen their own, and serve to promote collaborations that could in time transform the language sciences.

Potential Broader Impacts

The PI will use conference proceeding to produce an edited book, a special issue of a journal, and a website resource center. These outcomes will allow a broad array of language researchers and cognitive scientists to benefit from discussions that take place at the conference. The most significant effect of the meeting may be the challenge and inspiration it will provide to graduate students in ecological psychology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and related areas of cognitive science, to go beyond the successes and failures of the current generation of scholars. The outcomes of the meeting will also be of interest to members of the broader public who have a serious interest in the important role of language in social, political, and economic life.