Research

My current research program is devoted to examining atypical acquisition of speech sound production skills in children. Both perceptual (i.e., transcription) and acoustic analysis methods are utilized. A past focus of the lab has been on factors related to long-term speech sound normalization in children whose only difficulty has been with acquiring the speech sound system (i.e., children with speech delay of unknown origin). Currently the main focus of research in my lab is on how intelligible speech develops in young hearing impaired children who have been fitted with cochlear implants. Both longitudinal and cross-sectional data sets are being developed. Some ongoing and upcoming projects relating to this population include:

- intelligibility of conversational speech

- intelligibility of single-word speech

- perceptual analysis of vowel development

- acoustic analysis of vowel development

- occurrence of natural process errors

- contribution of natural process errors to reduced speech intelligibility

- prosody-voice characteristics of conversational speech

Recently some preliminary work has also begun looking at speech and language acquisition in children learning Appalachian English.