Research Interests:

My research spans the fields of auditory perception, acoustic phonetics, linguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. The main question I am interested in is how pitch and timing characteristics in speech are used in understanding spoken language. To this end I have been investigating how adults and infants use timing and pitch information to break up the speech stream (the segmentation problem), as well as how listeners process the intonational characteristics of speech. In collaborative research involving fMRI, we have been investigating the brain areas involved in extracting pitch information from spoken language. Finally, in other work, I have examined how non-modal voice quality (especially glottalization) marks phrasal boundaries in connected speech.