Projects
Research Projects
My research examines how listeners and speakers produce, perceive, and process linguistic information. The projects below address different aspects of this broader goal, with a particular focus on lexical prosody and spoken language processing.
PROLEX: Processing of Lexical Prosody
Research focus: Word recognition through lexical prosody
This project examines how listeners perceive and use lexical-prosodic acoustic cues to recognize native and non-native words. The first part of the project examines word recognition through the use of the acoustic cues of lexical pitch accents by English, German, and Serbian listeners. We employ nonsense word-learning and eye-tracking methodology in this part. This part is carried out with the group from the University of Calgary and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
The second part of the project explores the neural activity during the automatic processing of stress location and stress cues in Standard German and Austrian German. We use EEG measurements, specifically focusing on the MMN components in a multi-feature oddball task.
Research questions
- How do listeners use pitch and duration to identify lexical pitch accents?
- Do native and non-native listeners differ in their weighting of these acoustic cues?
- How does linguistic experience influence the perception of lexical prosody?
Methods
- Speech perception experiments
- Acoustic analysis
- Eye-tracking
- Statistical modelling
Speech Production and Phonetic Variation
Research focus: Speech production and coarticulation
This line of research investigates how speech sounds are realised in different phonetic and linguistic contexts. It focuses on the sources of phonetic variation and on how articulatory and acoustic properties of speech are influenced by neighbouring sounds and broader linguistic contexts.
Research questions
- How does phonetic realisation vary across speakers and contexts?
- How do neighbouring sounds influence the acoustic properties of speech?
- How are contextual influences reflected in speech production?
Methods
- Acoustic phonetic analysis
- Speech production experiments
- Statistical modelling
NEULEX: Evidence Accumulation During Lexical Processing
Research focus: Lexical stress and spoken word recognition
This project investigates how listeners accumulate and integrate acoustic evidence during spoken word recognition, with a particular focus on lexical stress.
It aims to better understand how prosodic information contributes to lexical processing and how different acoustic cues shape the recognition of spoken words.
Research questions
- How do listeners use stress-related acoustic information during spoken word recognition?
- How are different prosodic cues integrated over time?
- How does linguistic experience shape the accumulation of perceptual evidence?
Methods
- Electroencephalography (EEG)
- Eye-tracking
- Auditory perception experiments
- Computational modelling of evidence accumulation
A broader research perspective
Together, these projects contribute to my broader research goal: developing an architecture of human speech processing that accounts for variation and variability, contextual influences, and the role of lexical prosody in speech perception and production.