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Cognitive Science of Language Lecture Series talk by Dr. Ladd
By Linguistics and Languages Department
Free Lecture for Faculty, Graduate Students, Researchers
Overview
You are invited to the next talk of the Cognitive Science of Language lecture series organized by McMaster’s Department of Linguistics and Languages. The lecture will be delivered online by Dr. Bob Ladd. Dr. Ladd is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics and English Language, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh. Please email lingdept@mcmaster.ca to request a link..
Title: Singing in tone languages: From mystery to research questi
Abstract:
Speakers of European languages are likely to assume that there is some basic contradiction inherent in singing in a tone language: how do the intrinsic tones of the words fit with a musical melody? A good deal of recent research makes clear that in many tone languages the key aspect of matching tones and melodies involves matching the pitch direction from one note to the next, rather than – as might be expected – matching the pitch of individual syllables to individual notes in the melody. But there are many complications, depending (among other things) on the number of tonal contrasts in a languages, the presence of contour tones, and so on. I will discuss both the general implications of the fact that a good tone-melody match involves note-to-note pitch direction, and will briefly introduce some of the complications that have been investigated in recent work.