Research

My research focuses on sensitivity to acoustic detail and how people use small acoustic changes to help them recognize words—especially with regard to anticipatory processing. I am also interested in the role played by the lexicon during word recognition and how what we normally think of as low-level speech perception processes may interact with and be influenced by lexical knowledge.

Projects:

Place assimilation
Vowel-to-vowel coarticulation
Specific language impairment

Because language unfolds over time, and because I'm interested in how different factors affect processing time, much of my research is conducted using the visual world paradigm. This allows us to look at language processing as it occurs, millisecond by millisecond. Participants are presented with auditory instructions to manipulate— usually just click on—one or more objects/images in a set of images on a computer screen. Their eye-movements are monitored while they follow these instructions. Eye-movements reveal partial interpretations of the instructions before participants make their ultimate responses (clicking on the objects). Thus, fixations to visual objects provide a real-time window on the dynamics of lexical activation.

An additional advantage to this paradigm is that it combines natural, meaningful language with a very simple task in a visual context. Instead of thinking or making judgments about language, participants just need to use it. This allows the paradigm to be used with many populations of varying language ability. If you would like to know more about the details of the visual world paradigm, you can get more information from my lab's reference material page. You can also read more about other lab projects on our research page.