Workshop: How the Brain Accommodates Variability in Linguistic Representations; July, 2013 - University of Michigan

University Of Rochester, Rochester NY

Investigators

Abstract

When we listen, we rapidly and reliably decode speakers' intentions and we mostly do so independently of whom were are talking to. Yet, anyone who has interacted with an automated speech recognition system (e.g., while booking a flight) is painfully aware that speech recognition is a computationally hard problem: although we hardly ever become aware of it, the physical signal corresponding to, for example, one speaker's "b" can be identical to another speaker's "p", making it hard for computers to distinguish between them. How then does the human brain accomplish this task with such apparent ease? This NSF funded workshop brings together researchers from computer sciences, linguistics, and the cognitive sciences to discuss and investigate how the brain achieves robust language understanding despite variability. The invited speakers are internationally-known experts. Representatives from both industry and academia will present on the state of the art in automated speech recognition, implicit learning during language understanding, and the neural systems underlying speech perception. The workshop will take place in conjunction with the 2013 Linguistic Society of America's Summer Institute--the largest international linguistics summer school--and will thereby provide training to a large number of young language researchers.