Research
My work primarily deals with matters of speech perception, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience with a little sociolinguistics for flavor. I'm broadly interested in how listeners leverage variability in the speech signal to aid in the recognition thereof.
The projects below are in early planning stages with my advisor, Dr. Sahil Luthra. I'll update this page as things develop.
Selective Adaptation and Distributional Learning
In planningAre selective adaptation and distributional learning functionally equivalent mechanisms for recalibrating speech categories? Both paradigms produce systematic shifts in phoneme boundaries, but it remains unclear whether they reflect the same underlying process. This project will to test whether they produce convergent results across paradigms for: reaction time, ear specificity, talker and place-of-articulation generalization, and neural loci (EEG).
Key references: Kleinschmidt & Jaeger (2015); Dumay & Samuel (2026)
Talker-Specific Phonetic Signatures in Lexical Access
In planningHow do listeners use beliefs about a talker's phonetic signature to constrain lexical competition in real time? When a male talker raises the vowel in tack toward [teɪg] when preceding a voiced consonant, listeners who have inferred his phonetic pattern may exclude tag as a competitor more quickly. This project investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms behind this process, with a focus on whether right-lateralized voice processing regions contribute to talker-conditioned lexical access.
Key references: Trude & Brown-Schmidt (2012); Luthra et al. (2019); Righi et al. (2010)
Previous work
During my M.A. at Iowa, I contributed to research on heritage speaker word recognition (using the Visual World Paradigm), sociogenerational variability in sentence processing, and cross-linguistic phonetic cue learning in Korean-English bilinguals. See my CV for a full list of conference presentations and papers in preparation and check my OSF, Google Scholar or the Manuscripts tab of this website for published and in-prep manuscripts.