The Language Perception Laboratory focuses on speech perception and production and word recognition. Below is a sampling of some of the issues we are investigating.
Interested in Participating?
| Issues in Word Recognition |
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| People often report that foreign languages sound as if they don't have any pauses in them -- that they can't tell where the word boundaries are. In fact, fluent speech (regardless of language) doesn't generally have breaks between words -- what hits our ear is continuous stream of sound. How do we break that up into individual words?
Many sequences of speech can be heard in multiple ways. For example, the two word sequence "grey tie" could easily be misheard as "great eye". How does the brain deal with this ambiguity?
What types of interpretations get considered at the same time? When we hear speech, what are the "units" that we hear? Words? Letters? Syllables? Does this change with learning to read? |
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Issues in Speech Peception |
| How does knowing a person's voice influence how you perceive that person's speech? Research suggests that we do a better job identifying speech in a well-known voice. But why? And, might this also help you to separate out that person's speech from a noisy background?
What aspects of speech production make a particular talker more or less intelligible? How might the idiosyncracies of how one individual produces certain sounds influence your perception?
People do not all speak the same way; not only are there many different dialects, but each of us has our own individual speech characterstics as well. Not only is there variability between talkers, but the speech of a single talker may also vary from moment to moment: we may talk differently when excited than when depressed, and when speaking slowly vs. quickly. As listeners, how do we adjust for this variability? |
| Difficulties with Lexical Access |
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| We've all had the experience of having a word "at the tip of our tongue", where we just can't seem to gain access to it. What sorts of things might make this unpleasant experience happen more (or less) often?
How might aging, or hormonal changes (such as occur with pregnancy or menopause) influence this? Do women have more difficulty accessing words during menopause? |
What is it like to be a subject in one of our studies? Find out! The following sound files each consist of two words in a foreign language. Listen to each and try and guess where the word boundary is -- is it after the first syllable, before the last syllable, or halfway between the two?
(hint: there are two of each type...)
