Cognitive Science in a Nutshell.

We propose a novel characterization of the core of cognitive science as the study of how agents perform tasks, where agents and tasks are both broadly construed. We motivate the focus on agents and tasks through a discussion of their prevalence in cognitive science, their utility in identifying topics close to and distant from cognitive science, and their applicability to prominent issues in the field. We argue that our proposal clearly and succinctly highlights the distinctive characteristics of cognitive science and simultaneously motivates its interdisciplinary approach without losing sight of its roots in the study of information processing and cognitive representations.

Detecting Foreign Accents in Song.

This paper presents three experiments exploring the perception and production of accents in song. In a perception experiment, participants listened to passages sung and spoken by native and non-native speakers of English. The participants did better at identifying native speakers when listening to the spoken passages. Accents were also judged as more native-like in song than in speech. In addition, two production experiments compared the acoustic characteristics (pitch, duration, F1 and F2) of sung and spoken vowels, produced by native and non-native speakers of English. Both native and non-native speakers changed the pitch and duration of their vowels when singing; the vowel quality was not consistently shifted. Together, the results indicate that the melody imposed by the song impacts the suprasegmental properties of pronunciation whereas the segmental properties remain largely intact. Based on these results, we conclude that a main reason why accents are more difficult to detect in song than in speech is that the rhythm and melody imposed by the song mask intonational cues to accent.