In my current research at Northwestern University, I study speech production in individuals with and without major depressive disorder. We are particularly interested in acoustic correlates of psychomotor agitation and psychomotor retardation/slowing. To accomplish this goal, I use a combination of hand-annotation and automatic tools to measure aspects of speech rate, speech rate variability, and vowel quality and consistency while participants are completing a variety of tasks across multiple timepoints.
Publications and presentations arising from this research to date:
Exton, E., Klemballa, D., Keshet, J., Mittal, V., Shankman, S., & Goldrick, M. (2025). Evaluating the relationship between speech production variability and psychomotor dysfunction in individuals with major depressive disorder. Poster to be presented at the 188th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, New Orleans, Louisiana, May 18-23.
One of the main areas of my research concerns how the phonetic properties of code-switched speech influence individuals' ability to identify and perceive code-switching. I am particularly interested in this process when listening to unfamiliar languages, when semantic knowledge is not available. I have assessed such questions in a variety of participant populations including infants, children, and both monolingual and bilingual adults. Results from experiments with all of these populations can be found in my dissertation "Evaluating the role of acoustic cues in identifying the presence of a code-switch", and manuscripts stemming from that dissertation are currently under review or in preparation.
Publications and presentations arising from this research to date:
Exton, E. & Newman, R.S. (manuscript under review). Sensitivity to phonetic cues to code-switching in unfamiliar languages.
Exton, E. & Newman, R.S. (2024). Bilingual adults are sensitive to natural acoustic-phonetic cues to code-switching in unfamiliar languages. Poster presented at the 65th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, New York City, New York, November 21-24.
Exton, E. (2024). Evaluating the role of acoustic cues in identifying the presence of a code-switch. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland]. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/33380
Exton, E. & Newman, R.S. (2022). Time-course of identifying a code-switch while listening. Poster presented at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, Massachusetts, November 17-20.
Exton, E. & Newman, R. (2022). Infant detection of code-switching. Poster presented at the International Congress of Infant Studies, Ottawa, ON, Canada, July.
Exton, E, & Newman, R.S. (2019). Identification of code-switches in unfamiliar languages. Poster presented at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Montreal, Canada, November 14-17.
A second line of my dissertation research was to better characterize the nature of acoustic cues to code-switching, and particularly the role of speech register in the presence of these cues. I designed a study in which Spanish-English bilingual mothers narrated wordless picture books to both their infant and to another bilingual adult, and analyzed the interaction between their production of English and Spanish in each of those conditions. Data collection for this study remains ongoing, but initial results were presented at several conferences and in my dissertation "Evaluating the role of acoustic cues in identifying the presence of a code-switch". Original speech recordings will be made publicly available from consenting participants once the corpus is complete.
Publications and presentations arising from this research to date:
Exton, E. & Newman, R.S. (2023). Cross-linguistic phonetic transfer due to code-switching in infant-directed speech. Poster presented at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, San Francisco, California, November 16-19.
Exton, E. & Newman, R.S. (2023). Phonetic properties of code-switching in infant-directed and adult-directed speech. Poster presented at 48th Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, Massachusetts, November 2-5.
Exton, E. & Newman, R.S. (2023). Properties of infant-directed speech in unilingual and mixed-language contexts. Poster presented at Many Paths to Language Conference, Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, October 25-27.
Exton, E, & Newman, R.S. (2020). Acoustics of Spanish-English code-switching in speech to toddlers. Poster presented at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Virtual, November.
Early in my graduate training, my research focused on how individuals, especially bilingual listeners and children, comprehend speech that is degraded in some way (such as in the presence of background noise). Specifically, I studied the perceptual restoration effect, an auditory illusion in which listeners perceive a speech signal as complete when a portion of it is removed and replaced with a loud interrupting noise. I also mentored a high school intern who studied this phenomenon in monolingual and bilingual children.
In addition to the specific projects represented by the publications and presentations listed below, I contributed to many other projects focused on the comprehension of speech in background noise or when the speech is degraded by infants, toddlers, adults, and pet canines. I trained research assistants to run studies with each of these populations and consulted with lab managers and fellow graduate students on experimental design and interpretation of results.
Publications and presentations arising from this research to date:
Exton, E.L. & Newman, R.S. (2023 preprint). The effect of language background and listening-in-noise on the phonemic restoration effect. [Version 2]. doi: 10.31234/osf.io/p8nq4.
Exton, E. & Newman, R.S. (2021). Use of perceptual restoration in understanding degraded speech by monolingual and bilingual listeners. Poster presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Virtual, November.
Gowing, K., Newman, R, Exton, E. (2021). Perceptual restoration in monolingual and bilingual children. Poster presented at NSF-REU Intersection of Linguistics, Language, and Culture. Virtual, June.
Exton, E & Newman, R.S. (2020). Phonemic restoration in monolingual and bilingual listeners in a sentence context. Poster presented at the 179th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Virtual, December.
As a side project during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of fellow graduate students and I were particularly interested in studying the best ways to teach early elementary school children over Zoom. While social interaction and contingency is particularly helpful for toddlers' and preschoolers' learning over video, less research had been done about how children aged 4-7 might learn in video-conferencing settings. We, along with Dr. Rochelle Newman and Dr. Karrie Godwin (UMBC), designed a study to test the three view setting options available through Zoom that teachers could use to read a book with students and teach them facts: gallery view (in which all students and the teacher are visible, but a physical book the teacher is holding is small), presenter view (in which the teacher and the book they are holding are clearly visible but fellow students are very small or off-screen entirely), and screen-sharing (in which a digital copy of the book is easy to see but both the teacher and fellow students are small or off-screen entirely). We coordinated a series of experimental sessions involving several participants as "students" in a small-group, who listened to a teacher read a book to teach age-appropriate science lessons. While our results did not yield robust findings, we did present the work at several conferences. This work also gave me skills and experiences leading an experiment with children, that involved multiple participants at the same time. It also allowed me to expand my interests to include questions related to attention, cognition, and learning that are not directly related to language.
Publications and presentations arising from this research to date:
Oppenheimer, K., Exton, E., Buntrock, M., Newman, R. & Godwin, K. (2021). Remote Learning: How view settings impact 5-year-old children’s learning. Poster presented at the American Speech Language and Hearing Association Convention, Virtual, November.
Exton, E., Oppenheimer, K., Buntrock, M., Newman, R. & Godwin, K. (2021). The impact of screen settings on children’s learning in a remote classroom. Poster presented at the meeting of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, Virtual, September.
I previously studied adults process abstract and concrete words in their second language, and how the processing of abstract and concrete words is affected by the nature of their relationship to a preceding word. The "concreteness effect" is a well-studied phenomenon in which concrete words are processed more quickly and accurately than abstract words, and that concrete words have a larger N400 effect (an ERP component which points to some level of access/prediction/integration of a word's meaning). In this line of work, I was interested in the extent to which those patterns would hold true in different populations, such as bilinguals and people with aphasia. We further investigated whether pairing abstract or concrete words with another word that is taxonomically or thematically related would affect patterns of processing.
This project started as my senior honors thesis at Penn State, and I continued to collaborate with my mentors there to continue work on the project.
Publications and presentations arising from this research to date:
Sandberg, C., Exton, E, Coburn, K., Chun, S., & Miller, C.A. (2022). Event related potential exploration of the organizational structure of abstract versus concrete words in neurologically intact younger adults. Brain and Language, 230, 105138. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2022.105138.
Sandberg, C., Exton, E, Coburn, K., Chun, S., & Miller, C.A. (2020). Event related potential and time frequency exploration of the organizational structure of abstract versus concrete words in neurologically intact younger adults. Poster presented at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language, Virtual, October.
Exton, E., Sandberg, C., & Van Hell, J. G. (2018). ERP exploration of semantic organization for concrete and abstract words in bilinguals and persons with aphasia. Poster presented at the 25h Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Boston, Massachusetts, March 22-25.
Exton, E., Sandberg, C., & Van Hell, J. G. (2017). Bilingual semantic memory: concreteness effects in second language lexical decision and semantic relationship judgment tasks. Poster presented at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Vancouver, Canada, November 10-12.
Exton, E., Sandberg, C., & Van Hell, J.G. (2016). Concreteness effects in lexical decision and semantic relatedness judgment processing in bilinguals. Talk given at the Penn State University Center for Language Science, University Park, Pennsylvania, November 11.
Exton, E., Sandberg, C., & Van Hell, J.G. (2016). Concreteness effects in lexical decision and semantic relatedness processing in bilingual healthy adults. Poster presented at the 3rd Annual Penn State Undergraduate Linguistics Research Exhibition, University Park, Pennsylvania, October 15.