Research Interests

In the Communication and Language Lab, we explore the ways in which speakers and listeners utilize information present in the speech signal to facilitate communication. This includes, for example, highlighting what information is new or important in a conversation through emphasis, placing pauses and disfluencies in informative locations, and using prosody to convey information about speaker and listener beliefs.

Current Research

There are currently three major ongoing projects in the lab.

Pitch Accents - Angie Isaacs

A pitch accent refers to the greater perceived prominence of a word compared to other words in an utterance. Most researchers agree that accents can convey information about the discourse structure of a conversation. What theorists do not agree upon is the nature of this information and what form pitch accents might take. We are currently exploring:

• the kinds of information accents provide to a listener
• how a listener understands the meaning of an accent
• whether different accent forms provide different types of information and
• how and when accents are used (production)

Audience Design - Tuan Lam

We are running several studies on the topic of audience design and common ground with the goal of determining the extent to which speakers use knowledge about addressees in language production. We are currently examining whether pitch accent production is the result of speaker or listener centered processes.

Disfluencies - Scott Fraundorf

We are also investigating the higher-level processes that underlie language and communication. We are currently running a study investigating the role of speech fillers like "uh" and "um." While we might think of speech fillers as simply gaps in speech that have little meaning, experimental work has shown that speech fillers can actually facilitate communication -- for instance, by alerting listeners that a speaker is about to introduce new information to the conversation. We are currently investigating both speakers' use of speech fillers and listeners' comprehension of them through recorded storytelling.