Invited talk presented at the Dept. of Linguistics, Northwestern University, May 2013.
Abstract: Many researchers have observed that speech sounds vary considerably across different contexts, an issue known as the lack of invariance. Given this variability, how much information is conveyed by individual acoustic cues? That is, how reliably do specific cues distinguish phonological contrasts?.. Read more →
Toscano, J. C. (2013, February). Invited paper presented at the Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Abstract: During language acquisition, one of the first tasks encountered by infants is determining which sounds indicate phonological distinctions in their language and which do not. This is a particularly challenging problem, since it requires unsupervised learning (i.e.,.. Read more →
Toscano, J. C., & McMurray, B. (2012, November). Paper presented at the 11th Auditory Perception, Cognition, and Action Meeting, Minneapolis, MN.
Abstract: A number of researchers have become interested in the effects of indexical information on speech perception. A commonly studied indexical cue is talker gender, which produces systematic changes in acoustic cues that are relevant for speech... Read more →
Toscano, J. C., & McMurray, B. (2012, November). Poster presented at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Minneapolis, MN.
Abstract: A great deal of work in speech has argued that invariant acoustic cues do not exist, leading many researchers to conclude that listeners use specialized representations, such as talkers’ inferred gestures, instead... Read more →
Toscano, J. C., & McMurray, B. (2012, October). Poster presented at the 2012 Neurobiology of Language Conference, San Sebastian, Spain.
Abstract: Many models of speech perception posit that listeners perceive speech sounds categorically (i.e., that the units of speech perception are phoneme categories), and behavioral and electrophysiological evidence has supported this... Read more →
McMurray, B., & Toscano, J. C. (2012, October). Paper presented at the 164th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Kansas City, MO.
Abstract: Work on language comprehension is classically divided into two fields. Speech perception asks how listeners cope with variability from factors like talker and coarticulation to compute some phoneme-like unit; and word recognition assumed these units to ask how listeners cope with time and match the input to the lexicon... Read more →
