Congratulations to Professor Amanda Rysling, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, who was awarded a THI Faculty Fellowship for the 2019-2020 Academic Year for her project, “Prediction in Speech Processing.”
The THI Fellowship will allow Rysling the time to conduct a series of registered replications and novel extensions of previous studies investigating the prediction of sentence accent and length, as well as a critical re-evaluation of the literature on speech processing in light of (so far) systematic failures to find previously-reported results.
Rysling’s work advances the understanding of speech intonation and bridges divisions in the field between linguists who study different kinds of language processing (auditory and sentential). As such, Rysling’s proposed studies help bring together the community of linguists at UCSC and beyond as she recognizes the role of semantic focus, syntactic structure, and predictive cognitive mechanisms in the processing of intonation.
THI is proud to support this kind of multidisciplinary work. The fellowship recognizes Rysling’s commitment to working across scholarly and field-specific boundaries to, as Rysling describes, “understand the types of cues that listeners do and do not use to form predictions in language use, and when during the course of listening they do so.”
The Humanities Institute is a hub for academic research. Faculty Fellowship are one form of support that enables faculty to focus on research through one course replacement and a research stipend. Learn more about THI research funding opportunities online.