Research Interests

Talker Variability

No two people sound the same. In fact, if you were to ask the same person to say the same word two times in a row, they would produce two acoustic signals that are not identical. Given this practically infinite variability of speech, how is it that we can so effortlessly understand so many people, including those with different dialects, foreign accents, speech disorders, or any idiosyncracies?

Talker Familiarity

In Perception

We know that the brain partially deals with the inifinite Variability of speech by learning patterns of common features across large populations, but also patterns associated with individual talkers. Sure, you might have a decent idea of what a German accent sounds like, but you have a much better idea of what your good friend Lena sounds like, or what your parents sound like, or what your partner sounds like. Your brain constantly retunes your perception based on who is talking, and part of my research is concerned with the mechanisms underlying this constant retuning.

In Production

Based on what we know about talker-specific perception, we might say that we each have a different pair of ears for every single talker we know, but what about different mouths? Does having knowledge about how someone talks change how you talk to them? My research combines perception and production tasks to investigate not only how we acquire our many pairs of ears, but also how the same information might change the way we speak.