Anna Persson
Contact
Name and title: Anna Persson
ORCID0000-0001-5226-8568 Länk till annan webbplats.
Workplace: The Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Room D454Universitetsvägen 10 D
Postal address Institutionen för svenska och flerspråkighet106 91 Stockholm
Research group
About me
I work as a senior lecturer in Bilingualism at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism at the Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism. In November 2024, I defended my thesis in Scandinavian Languages on pre-linguistic normalization and vowel perception. My research interests broadly concern listeners' processing of spoken language, more specifically, how the brain deals with the fact that we all vary in our pronunciations. I investigate the underlying cognitive mechanisms that enable stable speech perception across talkers, using a combination of acoustic analysis, perception experiments and computational models.
I have a background teaching Swedish as a second language for high school students and adult students. I have also worked with test item writing, test validation and assessment for Tisus (Test in Swedish for university studies).
- Introduction to psycholinguistics
- Language assessment for teachers of Swedish as a second language
- Qualifying course in Swedish for university studies
As talkers, we all differ in our pronunciations, resulting in cross-talker differences in the mapping between acoustic cues and linguistic categories and meanings. From previous work, we know that listeners have a remarkable ability to rapidly adapt to the pronunciations of an unfamiliar talker, leading to stable cross-talker perception. What is less known is the specific mechanism(s) underlying this adaptive ability. A long-standing hypothesis in the literature is that listeners achieve stable cross-talker perception by normalizing the acoustic signal for talker-specific characteristics, related to anatomical differences in talker physiology (e.g., vocal tract length). Numerous accounts of pre-linguistic normalization have been proposed over the years. Widely used in variationist sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, and dialectology, accounts have often been compared and evaluated on how well they reduce category variability in vowel spaces. Less is known about their relative plausibility as models of human speech perception - how well they can explain what humans actually do. In my thesis, I investigate the predicted consequences of vowel normalization for stable cross-talker perception, using Swedish and English vowels. I approach this question by acoustic analysis, computational models and vowel perception experiments. In addition, I report on the static and dynamic acoustic characteristics of the modern-day Central Swedish vowel space.