Joy Mills
Read about the research being undertaken by Joy Mills, a PhD student in Linguistics
Thesis title
Prosody and sentence processing
Supervisors
A/Prof Sasha Calhoun and Prof Paul Warren
Abstract
The role of prosody in reading comprehension is difficult to study, as read-aloud prosody has been shown to be performative. How can this important aspect of sentence processing be investigated? The implicit prosody, or pitch, rhythm, stress, phrasing and intonation perceived when reading silently, could hold the answer. However, studying implicit prosody has its own challenges, as it is silent and personal. Two methods are priming and eye tracking.
Structural priming paradigms reveal the structures that listeners/readers construct while listening to or reading language, even though the structure may not have surface expression. Is this underlying structure purely prosodic or does the structure integrate prosodic information with lexical/syntactic information? This study will use both unprocessed and delexicalised (fafafa speech) auditory primes in a cross modal priming paradigm. It will be further investigated using eye tracking to see if differences exist in online vs. offline processing.
Research suggests that people may integrate prosodic and lexical/syntactic information differently based on individual differences, so this study features a within-subjects design to investigate this further. Specific differences this study will look at are Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ), Working Memory, Synchronisation and Auditory Visualisation.
Biography
Joy Mills is currently pursuing her PhD at Victoria University of Wellington, investigating prosody and sentence processing. In 2019 she was awarded an MA in Psycholinguistics with distinction at the University of York in the UK, and previously completed her undergraduate degree in Psychology and Theatre at Swarthmore College in the US as well as training at the renowned Jacques Lecoq school of theatre in Paris. She is originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA and lived most recently in Melbourne, Australia.
Presentations
Mills, J. (2020). Prosodic Priming of Silent Reading. KiwiCam IX, Wellington, NZ.
Mills, J. (2020). Delexicalised Auditory Priming of Implicit Prosody. CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, Amherst, MA.
Mills, J. (2020). Delexicalised Auditory Priming of Implicit Prosody. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2020.
Thomas, D. G., Anderson, J., Bryant, A., Michaluk, L. M., & Mills, J. (2005, May). Auditory stimuli influence spatially defined temporal judgments. Poster presented at the 17th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Society, Los Angeles, CA.