Martijn Bentum will defend his thesis on Thursday 22nd of April 2021
Due to the restrictions surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak, and the corresponding limitations regarding number of guests allowed in the Academiezaal, the event will be accessible via live-stream. As with all defences, it is a public event and everybody is welcome to join online.
While speech perception might not be the philosophical 'hard' problem of the human mind, it is still far from trivial to transduce air pressure difference into intelligible words. A big challenge for perception is that the sensory input is typically underdetermined to unambiguously identify something, such as words in spoken language. The Predictive Coding theory proposes that anticipation could be an important mechanism to deal with this perceptual ambiguity.
In his thesis, Martijn Bentum uses the Predictive Coding theory as a theoretic framework to study anticipatory processes of speech perception. The combined results from the experiments show that listeners anticipate speech sounds and words during the processing of natural speech. Listeners are not only sensitive to the local context of the immediately preceding words but also take into account the wider context of register. Predictive language processing is partially based on the sequential nature of the language input, which can be modelled with information theoretic measures.
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