Université de Montréal, Pavilion Marie-Victorin, Room D-427

The recording of the lecture is available: here

Speech vs. Song: What’s the difference and why does it matter?

Abstract: Knowing the difference between speech and song does not seem like a difficult task, but ask yourself the age-old question: “what makes something a song?” It is a complex task to describe what acoustic features or relationships among features must be present to know we’re listening to song and not speech. It is perhaps an even more complex task early in development, when infant- and child-directed utterances contain many musical features that blur the lines between speech and song. I will present data that addresses when in development listeners differentiate speech and song, what acoustic features are crucial for differentiating speech and song, and whether knowledge of speech and song is important for applying musical or linguistic knowledge in a domain-dependent manner. I argue that having well-formed categories for speech and song is important for guiding attention to domain-relevant features in real-world settings and describe future work my lab is planning to address these questions.

Bio: Christina’s research examines how humans learn to communicate through music and language in everyday listening settings. Specifically, her work falls into two main themes examining 1) the similarities and differences in music and language perception and cognition and 2) attention to speech in complex scenes. This work uses behavioural and EEG methodologies to examine developmental processes from infancy to adulthood in her newly formed LAMA (Language, Attention, Music, and Audition) lab at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Christina graduated with her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2016 and completed post-doctoral training in cognitive neuroscience at Western University’s The Brain and Mind Institute in 2021.