Research -- facilities and publications
Research Facilities
Ongoing Research Projects
- This is an umbrella project housing three smaller projects:
- SKILLS4words (Small Kids Learning Language Sounds for Words) is a project in which we aim to better understand the relationships between children’s word knowledge and knowledge of the sound structure of language. We're studying this in lots of different groups, including children with hearing impairment who use cochlear implants, late-talking children, and children from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. Our goal is to help children who are at risk for smaller-sized vocabularies develop the skills needed to acquire a large number of words quickly and efficiently. We hope this will positively affect their later language development, and their early reading skills, too.
- Paidologos: Cross-linguistic investigation of phonological development: The name paidologos is a new word that we made up from Greek roots meaning child and word, in order to capture our idea of looking at children’s words in parallel across different languages. To do that, we traveled to day care centers and children’s homes in Hong Kong, eastern Japan, northern Greece, the far northeast of China, South Korea, and central Ohio to record the speech of two- to five-year-old children who were learning to speak Cantonese, Japanese, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, or English. Associated colleagues in Taiwan, New Caledonia, and France are currently collecting similar data for children who are learning to speak Taiwanese, Drehu, Taihitan, or French, as well as some data from children who are learning to speak two languages -- e.g., Taiwanese and Mandarin or Drehu and French.
- From Math to Mouth: Using Machine Learning to Understand Relationships Between Speech Input and Speech Acquisition:In this project, we are trying to understand this complex learning process by building mathematical models called manifolds. A manifold describes what our brains might know about something that is very complex and multi-dimensional by building a much lower-dimensional "map" of it. For example, a map of the world is a two-dimensional manifold built to describe what we need to know to navigate the three-dimensional surface of our planet. These projects are supported through grants from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders and from the National Science Foundation.
- This study investigates whether the perception of the /I/-/E/ merger can be elicited by visual cues that are associated with the social stigma.
- Using perceptual adaptation and shadowing in a vocabulary learning task, we can recreate sound change conditions. Language users are exposed to innovative variants in this way, then are tested using lexical decision and eye-tracking, to see how they incorporate the new variants into their existing phonemic categories, to what extent they generalize the new variants to new words, talkers, and linguistic environments, and whether they can develop linguistic and extra-linguistic associations with the new variants.
Selected Publications
Beckman, M. E., Munson B., & Edwards J. (2011). Methodological issues in the study of phonotactic probability effects in nonword repetition. Proceedings of the XVIIth International Congress on Phonetic Sciences.
Bradlow, A., Clopper, C., Smiljanic, R., & Walter, M. A. (2010). A perceptual similarity space for languages: Evidence from five native language listener groups. Speech Communication, 52, 930-942.
Clopper, C. G. (in press). Effects of dialect variation on the semantic predictability benefit. Language and Cognitive Processes.
Clopper, C. G., Rohrbeck, K. L., & Wagner, L. (in press). Perception of dialect variation by young adults with high-functioning autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Clopper, C. G., & Smiljanic, R. (2011). Effects of gender and regional dialect on prosodic patterns in American English. Journal of Phonetics, 39, 237-245.
Clopper, C. G., Pierrehumbert, J. B., & Tamati, T. N. (2010). Lexical neighborhoods and phonological confusability in cross-dialect word recognition in noise. Laboratory Phonology, 1, 65-92.
Edwards, J., Munson B., & Beckman M. E. (2011). Lexicon-phonology relationships and the dynamics of early language development -- a commentary on Stoel-Gammon's 'Relationships between lexical and phonological development in young children'. Journal of Child Language. 38(1), 35-40.
Kim, D., Stephens, J. D. W., & Pitt, M. (in press). How does context play a part in splitting words apart? Production and perception of word boundaries in casual speech. Journal of Memory and Language.
Kong, E., Beckman M. E., & Edwards J. (Submitted). Voice onset time is necessary but not always sufficient to describe acquisition of voiced stops: The cases of Greek and Japanese.
Kong, E. J., Beckman M. E., & Edwards J. (2011). Why are Korean tense stops acquired so early: The role of acoustic properties. Journal of Phonetics. 39(2), 196-211.
Munson, B., Edwards J., & Beckman M. E. (2011). Phonological representations in language acquisition: Climbing the ladder of abstraction. (A. C. Cohn, C. Fougeron, M. K. Huffman, Ed.).Handbook of Laboratory Phonology.
Smith, B. J. (under review). Eth and Theta: A tale of two phonemes. Journal of Laboratory Phonology.
Smith, B. J. (in press). An Acoustic analysis of voicing in American English dental fricatives. OSU Working Papers in Linguistics. Vol. 60.