Research

Research projects: 

Developing a Multi-scale Toolkit to Quantify Linguistic Experience

• Macro-level, stable, community-level experience 

  • Atlas-CH

    • Successful language comprehension requires listeners to rapidly adapt to linguistic variability, including accented speech. While a growing body of research suggests that long-term exposure to diverse linguistic input can facilitate such adaptation, characterizing the real-world experience remains a challenge. Traditional self-report measures are limited by recall bias and fail to capture incidental exposure. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel geolocation-based metric that quantifies local linguistic diversity using US Census data at the zip code level. Specifically, we use the proportion of nonnative English speakers as a proxy for environmental exposure to accented speech. We report an initial application of this method in a large-scale online perceptual study (N=647) of monolingual English speakers across the United States. Participants completed a cross-modal matching task designed to assess rapid adaptation to Chinese-accented English. Results show that our census-based metric predicted both subjective familiarity with the accent and perceptual adaptation during the first few moments of exposure. Crucially, adaptation was predicted by the prevalence of Chinese-accented speech in participants’ local environment, but not by the prevalence of other accents (e.g., Spanish), suggesting accent-dependent facilitation. This new geolocation-based approach provides a scalable, objective complement to self-reported measures, and is readily applicable even to populations where self-reporting proves infeasible or unreliable, such as older adults and clinical populations. It will enhance our understanding of how linguistic diversity in the environment shapes speech perception, adaptation, and learning.

    • Atlas-SP

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• Micro-level, dynamic, individualized experience

  • SNAP-heritage-Mandarin

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Category-specific Adaptation to Nonnative Accents

• Hearing Beyond Categories: General Adaptation to Nonnative Speech (in Proceedings of CogSci 2005)

  • Listeners demonstrate remarkable adaptability in speech perception, rapidly improving their recognition of non-native

  • accented speech after brief exposure. This study examines whether such adaptation reflects category-specific adjustments or a broader relaxation in processing unfamiliar accented categories. Using a pretest-exposure-posttest paradigm, we conducted two experiments to investigate how native English listeners’ perception of the Mandarin-accented /θ/-/s/ contrast changed as a function of accent exposure. We compared changes in lexical decision performance between participants exposed to Mandarin-accented audio sentences (Experiment 1) and those exposed to pure tones (Experiment 2). Results support the notion of general category relaxation, with both /θ/ and /s/ categories expanding from pretest to posttest.

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Error Detection in Nonnative Speech