Speech Production & Perception Lab
Research in the Speech Production and Perception Laboratory examines speech performance in individuals with and without communication disorders, with special emphasis on bilingual populations. Under the direction of Erika S. Levy, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and trilingual speech-language pathologist, this lab is affiliated with the Speech & Language Pathology program in Teachers College's Department of Biobehavioral Sciences.
A goal of our research is to better understand patterns of speech production and perception by second-language learners. We aim to recreate natural speech patterns as much as possible within the laboratory setting in order to learn about real-world speech production and perception and their disorders. A theme of this research has been the investigation of utterances in continuous speech, in which neighboring vowels and consonants affect each other's pronunciation, as opposed to isolated speech utterances. Our work informs educational and therapeutic approaches to speech and language learning and disorders in multilingual populations.
Of particular interest are the ramifications of the shortage of bilingual speech-language pathologists in the United States, including the frequent mismatch between the clients’ and clinicians’ language backgrounds. Examples of the questions we ask are how children with communication disorders perceive accented “clear speech,” an intelligibility-enhancing style of speech, and how clinicians (e.g., native speakers of English) evaluate speech sound disorders in a second language (e.g., Spanish). A goal of this research is to determine where difficulties lie when such a mismatch occurs in order to help pave the way for improvement in the accuracy of speech-language pathology service provision in a second language.