Linguistics Graduate Student
University of California, Berkeley
skatseff@berkeley.edu
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Research Interests: speech motor control, speech perception, production, adaptation, aphasia, language acquisition Speech production and speech perception are linked processes: what we hear influences what we say and vice versa. We can repeat after a teacher or imitate foreign accents (some of us better than others), and as infants we learn our native language after months of careful listening to the voices around us. How does this happen? My research takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how this happens, borrowing models from neuroscience and engineering and experimental methods from psychology to conduct studies informing controversies in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and motor control. It turns out that we're constantly adjusting what we say based on what we hear, even as adults. We see this process in action in accommodation, where you start to pick up the accent of people you're talking to, or even when you adjust the volume of your voice upward in a stadium and downward in a seminar room. We can do this because we are constantly listening to our own voices comparing them to what we expect ourselves to sound like - auditory feedback - and what we expect our muscles to feel like - somatosensory feedback. My research hinges on an exciting device that is able to alter auditory feedback. The formant alteration device is basically a headset where the microphone is connected to a computer and then back to the earphones, so that a speaker can hear everything s/he says in real time. The experimenter can either tell the computer to do nothing, or can change vowel formants. The amazing thing is, people compensate for these changes by opposing them: if they hear their voice with a higher pitch, they'll start speaking with a lower pitch. My dissertation work shows that the way people compensate for altered auditory feedback is not straightforward, in part because compensation appears to be influenced by practice with one's native phonological system. You can read a lot more about that here. I am currently a post doctoral fellow at the New Zealand Institute for Language, Brain, and Behaviour, housed at the University of Canterbury in beautiful Christchurch, New Zealand. |