Director
Chao-Yang Lee
Room
W2?? Grover Center
About the Facility
During speech communication, a listener extracts information from the acoustic signal to derive linguistic representations intended by the speaker. The nature of the linguistic representations and the processes involved in accessing the representations are the major inquiries for the Speech Processing Laboratory (SPL).
Research at SPL focuses on the acoustic nature of speech sounds and the mapping from acoustics onto the mental lexicon. Acoustic analyses are conducted to evaluate the acoustic-articulatory-linguistic relationships. On-line psycholinguistic experiments, implemented with the Brown Lab Interactive Speech System (BLISS), are used to explore the processes implicated in spoken word recognition.
Current projects include investigations on the role of lexical tone in spoken word recognition and, in collaboration with Dr. Kenneth Stevens at MIT, on the acoustic characteristics of fricative consonants in Mandarin Chinese. The broad goal at this stage is to delineate the phonetic knowledge and cognitive processes involved in speech processing in normal adults. Future research aims at issues of lexical tone acquisition and lexical tone processing deficits in neurologically damaged patients.
Equipment