Current Research
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I strongly support the open science movement!
All of my experimental research has been conducted after publicly pre-registering my rationale, methods, and analysis. After I run the experiment, I release the experiment files and raw data so anyone can attempt to replicate my findings, which is critical to advancing scientific understanding. I strongly support the open science movement, which is why my work is publicly available through the Open Science Framework (OSF). Click the link below to visit my OSF research hub.
Intonational cues in emotional contexts
How do listeners disentangle intonational cues to linguistic meaning from cues to the speaker’s psychological state? Also, how systematic is the relationship between the speaker’s psychological state and their production of perceptually consistent intonational cues? This project is about the mapping between intonational form and meaning. The rationale for the work is to use a cognitive framework for emotion in order to probe the phonetic realization of intonational categories across psychological dimensions which covary with intonational cues. This will tell us how a critical component of linguistic meaning, intonation, is interpreted robustly across discourse contexts.
Dynamic pitch perception in speech versus nonspeech
What we know about pitch perception for speech is mainly based on experiments that do not involve people listening to meaningful or natural speech. Some stimuli is simplex and completely computer generated, other stimuli is more complex resynthesized speech or isolated sustained vowels. This project asked whether perceptual thresholds differ depending on the complexity of the speech signal. The findings show that pitch movements in nonspeech is easier for listeners to detect, versus resynthesized speech. Based on this, we recommend that for the purposes of linguistic research, speech materials should be as natural as possible, and nonspeech should in particular be avoided.