One of the primary goals of my research is to understand how listeners extract linguistic units from the speech signal. A central question concerns whether listeners represent speech sounds in terms of continuous acoustic features or in terms of discrete phoneme categories. Early work in speech perception (Liberman, Harris, Hoffman, & Griffiths, 1952) suggested that speech is perceived in terms of categories and that listeners largely ignore acoustic variation within a phoneme category... Read more →
Blog Archives
Computational models of speech perception
By building computer models of the speech system and running simulations with them, we are able to better understand how phonetic categories are learned and how listeners process speech sounds during word recognition. I use several types of models to study speech perception, including neural network and statistical models. Two of the specific problems I am working on are unsupervised learning and cue weighting... Read more →
Tagged with: computational modeling, cue integration, cue weighting, research, speech development, statistical learning, unsupervised learning, voice onset time
Posted in Research
Posted in Research
Measuring cue encoding and categorization
A classic question in speech perception concerns whether listeners are sensitive to the continuous acoustic features in the speech signal independently of phonological information. Recent work has shown that listeners can perceive within-category acoustic differences at the level of lexical representations. However, these responses also show effects of phonological categories. Thus, it is unclear whether there is an earlier stage of processing that is not influenced by category information... Read more →
Tagged with: auditory n1, categorical perception, electrophysiology, erps, gradiency, p300, research, speech perception, voice onset time
Posted in Research
Posted in Research
Cue integration during spoken word recognition
One way for listeners to cope with variability in the speech signal is to use multiple acoustic cues when identifying speech sounds. Multiple cues often contribute to a single phonetic distinction in speech, and listeners can combine different sources of acoustic information to help resolve ambiguity. For example, one of the primary acoustic cues to the voicing distinction in English, the difference between the sounds ‘b’ and ‘p’, is voice-onset time (VOT)... Read more →
Tagged with: cue integration, eye-tracking, language processing, research, speaking rate, visual world paradigm, voice onset time, vowel length
Posted in Research
Posted in Research