Current Projects

Children's perception of nonnative accents and regional dialects

In this project, we have been testing how speech intelligibility varies as a function of the listener’s age (child vs. adult), the talkers accent or dialect (e.g., unfamiliar regional dialects and nonnative accents) and listening environment (quiet or noise). We are also testing how children’s conceptions of perceptual distances between various accents and dialects compared to their home dialect may differ from adult perception.

—In collaboration with Dr. Rachael Holt at The Ohio State University with support from our student collaborators and research assistants: Malachi Henry, Holly Lind-Combs, Jessica Bell, Alondra Rodriguez, and Payton Bastie

Intelligibility of speech in hospital noise

This project is investigating how hospital noise influences a listener’s ability to understand medically-related sentences that differ in word frequency and familiarity. The hospital noise condition will be compared with quiet and speech-shaped noise conditions.

—In collaboration with Drs. Melissa Baese-Berk and Erica Ryherd with research assistant, Shelemiah Crockett

Perceptual representation of speaker gender

This project investigates listeners’ perceptual representation of speaker gender beyond the binary (e.g., either male or female). We consider how listeners perceptually represent speakers of diverse gender identities and how experience with diverse identities may shape perceptual representations. Cisgender and transgender speakers have provided stimuli that listeners with varying social network compositions categorize using an auditory free classification paradigm.​

—In collaboration with Dr. Brook Merritt at The University of Texas at El Paso.

Perception of disordered speech in children

The project utilizes acoustic and phonetic measurements to quantify differences in acoustic characteristics among monolingual American English-speaking children with and without speech sound disorders. The project also seeks to identify social preferences of typically developing children when presented with disordered speech to further elucidate the social world of young children who present with speech sound disorders.

— Led by PhD student Malachi Henry

Perception of Vocal Timbre

This project investigates how twang vocal timbre influences psychological and social perception of speech. We are investigating how intelligibility is affected by timbre comparing twang speech and neutral speech in traffic-shaped noises. We are also investigating how twang timbre interacts with social aspects such as credibility, gender typicality, and age.

— Led by PhD Student Tribby Tsai