Individual differences in L1/L2 speech perception/production
My research explores individual differences in the perception and production of speech sounds in both first (L1) and second (L2) languages. The focus is on how listeners vary in their sensitivity to multiple acoustic cues and how these differences relate to cognitive abilities and individual traits. Using methods such as eye-tracking and acoustic analysis, I investigate perceptual cue weighting in English and Korean stop contrasts, and how factors like executive function and autistic traits may influence L1 transfer in L2 learning.
- Grant Awarded :
National Research Foundation of Korea: 2012.05~2014.04, PI
National Research Foundation of Korea: 2017.11~2019.10, Co-PI ("A study on individual differences in acquiring L2 English phonological contrast: Focusing on effects of Korean child- and adult-individuals’ L1 linguistic experience and cognitive ability")
National Research Foundation of Korea: 2024.06~2027.05, PI (" Longitudinal change in the perception strategies of individual language learners of varying proficiency: The case of English-speaking adult learners of Korean" 외국어 능숙도에 따른 소리음 범주화 전략 추이 개인차 연구: 영어 모국어 성인 학습자의 한국어 습득을 중심으로)
Gender/generation/dialectal differences in the speech categories
I investigate sociophonetic variation in Korean. My studies include gender and generational differences in the production and perception of non-front vowels in Seoul Korean, gender-differentiated attitude and perception of the short-tongue pronunciation in Korean, and how young speakers of the Jeju dialect realize laryngeal contrasts in stop consonants.
- Grant Awarded :
National Research Foundation of Korea: 2017.07~2019.06, PI "Gender-differentiated patterns in Korean sibilants: An acoustic investigation of synchronic/diachronic sound change")
Fine-grained phonetics and first language acquisition
My research interests focus on first-language phonological development (Paidologos Project:http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~edwards/). To study this, I have examined differences across languages in the fine phonetic detail of a contrast, both in production and perception. Most of my work during doctoral program focused on the role of fine-grained phonetic differences in explaining cross-linguistic patterns of mastering the ‘same’ phonological categories in English, Japanese, Greek and Korean. Particularly, I put an emphasis on adult listeners’ utilization of language-specific speech cues to their judgments of children’s productions. This research highlights an importance of detailed acoustic descriptions in evaluating developmental universals.
As a post-doctoral research associate in Waisman Center, UW-Madison, I continued studying first-language phonological acquisition, extending the experimental paradigm to include perception studies using an eye-tracker. More specifically, I have been conducting cross-linguistic perception experiments using the anticipatory eye-movement paradigm with adult listeners of English and Korean, aiming to capture language-specific sensitivity to acoustic parameters for a laryngeal contrast. The same task paradigm will be conducted with English- and Korean-speaking children (aged 3;0~5;0) to infer when and how language-specific perceptual sensitivity occurs in children’s speech perception.
Phonetics, Phonology, Psycholinguistics
Cross-linguistic aspect of phonological acquisition (Paidologos Project:http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~edwards/, http://learningtotalk.org/)
Our research investigates the cross-linguistic aspects of phonological acquisition, with a particular focus on the development of voicing and aspiration contrasts in plosive categories across languages. Drawing on data from projects such as the Paidologos Project and Learning to Talk, we examine fine-grained acoustic properties in children’s speech production, as well as how adult listeners perceive child speech across different language backgrounds. We also explore how infants and children perceive speech, and how their perception relates to the acoustic detail of the input signal. Using the visual world paradigm, we analyze cross-linguistic differences in both adult and child listeners, including gradient perception of multiple acoustic cues (e.g., VOT, f₀) in stop voicing contrasts, individual differences in within-category sensitivity, and language-specific anticipatory eye movements during speech processing. These analyses rely on time-series data modeling using mixed-effects regression applied to eye-tracking data. In addition, we investigate prosodic features in English, Japanese, and Korean, focusing on the role of pitch range variation in both speech production and perception.