Speech Research Laboratory 

Robert Felty and Volya Kapatsinski recently gave presentation at the 6th conference on the Mental Lexicon in Banff, Alberta, Canada, October 7th-10th. Over 100 leading scholars in psycholinguistics and word recognition came together to discuss their research on trying to discover how humans store and access words.

Robert gave an oral presentation with co-authors Adam Buchwald and David B. Pisoni entitled Constructing neighborhood density from spoken word recognition errors. Click on the image to download slides from the presentation in pdf format.

Volya presented a poster entitled Product and source-oriented generalization over an (artificial) lexicon. Click on the image to download a pdf version of the poster.

Two honor students working in the SRL, Althea Bauernschmidt and Melissa Troyer, recently defended their honors theses.

Audiovisual Phonological Fusion and Temporal Asynchrony
Melissa Troyer

In her thesis, Melissa investigated the perception and detection of timing asynchronies in a newly discovered phenomenon known as audiovisual phonological fusion (AVPF). In this type of fusion, visual information (e.g., back) combines with auditory information (e.g., lack) to create a fused percept (i.e., black).

Subjects were presented with stimuli that different in the amount of temporal offset ranging from 300 ms of auditory lead to 500 ms of visual lead and completed two tasks. In the asynchrony judgment task, subjects were asked to determine whether the auditory and visual portions of a stimulus occurred at the same time (“in sync”) or at different times (“out of sync”). The stimuli presented in both tasks were the same, but the ordering of the tasks was manipulated in order to see whether performing one task first would have an effect on the other task.

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