Hearing and Speech Sciences

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Language Development &
Perception Laboratories

Adult Language Perception Lab
Our adult laboratory examines two primary questions: How do listeners adjust for variability in the speech signal, and how do listeners and speakers find the appropriate words from the thousands that they know.
Adjusting for variability

No two people produce sounds in exactly the same way, and no single person produces the same intended sound consistently across situations. Listeners need to adjust for these differences among talkers, speaking rates, and contexts in order to interpret the signal accurately, and this adjustment requires effort on the part of the listener.

We have been particularly focusing on how listeners adjust their perception for the rate at which speakers talk. When talkers speak more quickly, they shorten their sounds - but this causes a potential problem because duration is also a primary means of differentiating between some speech sounds. For example, a "b" and a "w" differ primarily in their duration - if a "w" is shortened, it sounds more like a "b". Thus, the same acoustic signal could have been a "b" by someone speaking slowly, or a "w" by someone speaking quickly - and listeners need to decide which is the correct interpretation very quickly.
Finding Words

Adult speakers know thousands of words and must select the correct one to match the incoming speech signal; the same problem occurs when speaking - the speaker has to select and retrieve the appropriate words to match the concepts he or she wants to express from thousands of possible choices. Both processes require fast and accurate access to the mental dictionary, or the lexicon.

We have been investigating how the lexicon is organized, and what processes people use to gain access to this information. In some studies, we have explored properties of words that influence the ease with which they are accessed. in other studies, we have explored how these lexical access processes differ in clinical populations, seeking to determine the stage in these individuals' processing systems during which problems are likely to originate.Most recently, we are using these types data to articulate and test a new model of how lexical access works.

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Department of Hearing & Speech Sciences
0100 Lefrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742
Tel: 301-405-4214
Fax: 301-314-2023