We investigate cognitive and physical aspects of speech communication cross-linguistically, operating at the intersection of linguistic phonetics, speech science, and psycholinguistics.

Components of the speech chain: physiology, acoustics, perception, production

• The articulatory and acoustic strategies speakers employ to produce and control speech for communicative intent
• The perceptual and cognitive processes listeners use to extract meaning from speech sounds and phonetic details
• The role of suprasegmental features and related phenomenon in the acquisition and mental representation of sound categories across languages

Speech and music

Relationships between voice quality, musical timbre, and noise

Language Documentation

Currently we are investigating tones and voice quality in Hanoi Vietnamese and Hengyang Xiang.

The lab has a long history of language documentation and revitalization.