LINGUISTICS SEMINAR: Jinhee Kwon (Lund) -- The computational, contextual, cognitive, and cortical architecture of the Swedish tone accents

The computational, contextual, cognitive, and cortical architecture of the Swedish tone accents

Swedish word accents constitute a prosodic contrast with implications for lexical organisation and spoken word processing. The tone accent system interacts with morphological structure, lexical complexity, and contextual interpretation. This project aims to understand the two accents as information-bearing cues that operate across multiple representational levels.

The work combines corpus-based phonological statistics, information-theoretic modelling, semantic context measures, and neurophysiological methods (EEG and MEG). These approaches address three central questions: 1) how the two-tone accents are distributed across the lexicon and modulate lexical informativity, 2) how prosodic and semantic cues jointly contribute to real-time comprehension, and 3) how tone accent cues are implemented in cortical dynamics over the time course of word processing. 

Together, the studies outline a multi-level account of the Swedish tone-accent system spanning lexical structure, informativity, contextual interpretation and its neural underpinnings. The midway seminar will summarise empirical results to date, integrate the methodological strands and outline the remaining trajectory. 

LU Zoom meeting:https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/67006790336?pwd=rRaKDZBnYM3MruCGUuQCZCSJIvgzLJ.1

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Meeting ID: 670 0679 0336
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