The overall objective of research in the Speech Perception Laboratory is to increase our understanding of spoken language processing. Previous research in the field has shown that the acoustic form of any given word is not constant from utterance to utterance, but changes as a function of such factors as the specific talker who is speaking, the rate of speech, and the context in which the word is produced. Despite such variability, human listeners recognize spoken words with apparent ease. Our research team uses a variety of experimental paradigms to investigate the perceptual processes that underlie this ability, focusing on how listeners map the speech signal onto the sequences of phonetic segments (consonants and vowels) that comprise the lexical items of the language. The results of such investigations constrain theories of normal speech and language processing as well as theories of speech and language processing disorders, and they have implications for the development of human speech technologies.


Recent and ongoing projects include research on:

• Individual talker differences in phonetic properties of speech and listener sensitivity to these differences. See 2003 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America paper abstract, 2004 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America paper abstract, 2006 Acoustical Society of America conference abstract, 2007 Acoustical Society of America conference abstract, 2007 ICPhS conference abstract, and 2008 Acoustics '08 conference abstract.
  
  
• How listeners segment words in running speech, including speech produced with a foreign accent and speech produced at different speaking rates. See 2004 Acoustical Society of America conference abstract and Phonetica paper abstract (in press).
  
  
• Dialect differences in the production and perception of vowels: A comparison of standard (Parisian) French and Swiss French. (In collaboration with François Grosjean at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and Jean-Yves Dommergues at the University of Paris, France.) See 2000 Acoustical Society of America conference abstract and 2003 Psychonomic Society conference abstract.
  
  
• Audiovisual speech perception, focusing on the voicing contrast. See 2005 Perception & Psychophysics paper abstract, 2003 Perception & Psychophysics paper abstract, and 2002 Acoustical Society of America conference abstract.
  
  

The laboratory is a state-of-the-art facility customized for auditory and audiovisual speech perception research. PC and Macintosh computers are equipped with hardware and software to enable waveform editing, acoustic analysis, speech synthesis, and digital video editing. Additionally, computers are equipped with custom software designed for on-line presentation of auditory and audiovisual stimuli, as well as the collection and analysis of subjects' responses.

Primary support for the Speech Perception Laboratory is provided by NIH grant DC 00130 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.