Research

As a student in the psycholinguistics lab at Binghamton University, my research investigates the perception of phonological variation in spoken language. Words are pronounced differently depending on their context: for example, the word "green" is often prounounced like "greem" in a phrase like "green beans" (try it and see!) Despite this variation, people somehow recognize the intended word.

Two variants that I have studied are flaps (which occur in cases such as the "t" in American English words like "pretty", and in other contexts) and nasal flaps (which occur, for example, in productions of the word "winter" that sound similar to "winner").

My research, and other research in my mentor's lab, has suggested that there is a strong statistical component to spoken language recognition. Words that are often heard with variant productions are more likely to have the a strong representation for the variant production present in the mental lexicon. When there is no lexical representation for a production variant, some processing has to take place to recognize the variant as a production of the intended word.

By presenting native speakers with words, nonwords or "fake words", and sentences, asking them to make simple judgements such as "Word or nonword?", and then studying their responses and the amount of time it takes them to respond, we can make inferences about the mental processes that occur during spoken language processing, and how they are affected by factors such as sentence context, presence or absence of a variant, production frequency and lexical frequency, and others.