Research Interests

Undoubtedly words carry the brunt of the work in communication but the way the words are spoken (their prosody) also has an impact on spoken communication. Prosody conveys information about emotions, intentions, and discourse. The overarching goal of my research is to determine how prosody in general, and accenting in particular, facilitates production and comprehension of spoken English with particular focus on prosody's role in discourse. Specific areas of researh include:

1. What components do listeners use to detect prosodic cues?
2. How do listenersuse these cues to aid in speech comprehension?
3. Under what conditions are prosodic cues produced?
4. How does this production occur?

To answer these questions I use a variety of methodologies including acoustic analyses of prosody, online measures of comprehension such as eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm and ERPs.