My research focuses on speech perception and language acquisition. More specifically, I am interested in how the brain recognizes and learns words from fluent speech, especially in the context of noise, and how this ability changes with development. Recent research has examined topics such as:
Infants' ability to recognize their name in the context of noise
The effect of noise on children's ability to learn new words
Children's and adults' ability to comprehend degraded speech, such as that produced by a cochlear-implant
How information from one stream of speech can influence the perceptual processing of an alternate stream of speech 3
The effects of lexical neighbors on children's and adult's word naming, both those who are typically developing and those who have word-finding difficulties or who stutter
Whether infant perceptual abilities and parental input predict later language development
The effect of sports-related concussions on children's and adults' language processing
The impact of language switching on listeners' comprehension
The ability of young children diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to understand speech in noise
Dogs' abilities to understand human speech
