In 2017/2018 I was in Zurich, at the Phonetics Lab, hosted by professor Volker Dellwo.
I ran 2 EEG studies in cooperation with Martin Meyer's group at the Department of Psychology, UZH. The studies are now finished and the results are under evaluation.
1. In the course of a neurolinguistic study with the use of EEG, I wanted to determine how native speakers react to deviations from correct stress in native words and whether there are differences depending on the stress pattern. Trisyllabic words were taken into account and two stress patterns are tested in the standard and deviant conditions: penultimate and antepenultimate stress. 30 participants were asked to judge the correctness of words embedded in carrier sentences while electrophysiological responses are recorded. It was expected that an N400 effect would be observed in response to deviants that corresponds to lexical processing. Measurements were taken in February-March 2018, followed by ERP analysis in Matlab and EEGLab/ERPLab software. Statistics were provided using R.
2. The second study used an MMN paradigm (oddball task) to study the acoustic correlates of stress in Spanish. It was hypothesised that changes in pitch and spectral tilt would yield a different electrophysical response than changes in vowel duration.