One of the most important advantages we have in our work is the fact, that we have a very good understanding of what is in the speech signal - we know how to measure cues like voice onset time (VOT) and formant frequencies that listeners are likely to use to identify phonemes and words. This comes from two subfields of linguistics, phonetics and laboratory phonology, which are concerned with characterizing the sound-systems of languages in terms of both their production and perception. At a broader level, this allows us to characterize the information available to listeners, both in a single utterance, and over time to support development.

Research on phonetics is absolutely essential to work on speech perception and language comprehension, and the MACLab has undertaken a number of phonetic investigations examining the cues for stop consonants, fricatives and vowels, and across multiple languages (English and Swedish). This has been done in collaboration with a variety of linguists: Jennifer Cole at Illinois; Cathie Ringen and Jill Beckman at Iowa; and Allard Jongman at Kansas.

Relevant Papers

McMurray, B., and Farris-Trimble, A. (2012) Emergent information-level coupling between perception and production. In A. C. Cohn, C. Fougeron, and M. Huffman (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Laboratory Phonology. Oxford, UK: The Oxford University Press.

McMurray, B., Cole, J.S., and Munson, C. (2011) Features as an emergent product of computing perceptual cues relative to expectations. In R.Ridouane and N. Clement (Eds) Where do Features Come From? (pp. 197-236). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing

McMurray, B. & Jongman, A. (2011) What information is necessary for speech categorization? Harnessing variability in the speech signal by integrating cues computed relative to expectations. Psychological Review, 118(2), 219-246.

Beckman, J., Helgason, P., McMurray, B. & Ringen, C. (2011) Rate Effects on Swedish VOT: Evidence for Phonological Overspecification. Journal of Phonetics, 39, 39-49

Cole, J.S., Linebaugh, G., Munson, C., and McMurray, B. (2010) Unmasking the acoustic effects of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation: A statistical modeling approach. Journal of Phonetics, 38(2), 167-184.