Category: Listeners

ASA Chicago

5/11/2023

I had a good time at the Acoustical Society of America conference in Chicago. I participated in an invited panel with my co-author Sara Loss that Ben Munson organized about infusing social justice into acoustics pedagogy. We showed the sad null results we've gotten so far on our quest to find classroom interventions to help undergrads understand international instructors better (both in terms of intelligibility and attitudes). We got some good ideas for next steps, and we're not ready to give up yet (maybe we're measuring something different from what we're affecting).

LSA minicourse

1/8/2023

I taught a full-day minicourse/workshop at the Linguistic Society of America conference in Denver last week. A good group of grad students and faculty attended; we walked through various methods of remote sociophonetic data collection and discussed their really interesting project ideas. My co-author Sara Loss also gave a talk on our project about supporting better communication between undergrads and international students, TAs, and faculty. It was great to see so many old friends and colleagues, and the American Dialect Society Word of the Year was quite amusing this year!

OSU at ASHA

11/20/2022

This weekend, I went to ASHA in New Orleans with two undergrads in my lab, Bailey Smith and Mary Vang, to present work on how employers judge CI users as potential job applicants after listening to speech samples. Several other OSU faculty and students also attended and presented -- possibly our best showing in years. I'm so glad we're able to support student research and professional development at a national level!

Revisions

10/3/2022

This has been a busy few weeks, with three revisions recently submitted to journals:

"Employers’ speech-based first impressions of cochlear implant users," Part 3 of my series on how listeners judge the personalities and competence of cochlear implant users
"Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores and confusion matrices," which addresses the challenge of comparing continuous vowel production measures with responses from discrete perception tasks
"Dysarthric speech familiarization: Distributed practice and interleaving," spearheaded by Mik Martinelli, former linguistics grad student and now faculty at Midwestern State, and my OSU colleagues Sara Loss and Sabiha Parveen

Part 3 accepted

9/22/2022

Part 3 of a series of experiments about listeners' evaluations of cochlear implant speech has been accepted to the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. Titled "Employers’ speech-based first impressions of cochlear implant users," hiring managers rated talkers with typical hearing most positively, followed by highly-intelligible CI users and then less-intelligible CI users -- the same patterns as in Parts 1 and 2 (both 2018), which used college students listeners. Listeners didn't know the talkers were deaf. This unconscious bias could have negative effects on deaf/hard-of-hearing employment opportunities.

Three papers submitted

2/24/2022

This has been a busy winter, with three new manuscripts recently submitted to journals:

"Employers’ speech-based first impressions of cochlear implant users," Part 3 of my series on how listeners judge the personalities and competence of cochlear implant users
"Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores," which addresses the challenge of comparing continuous vowel production measures with responses from discrete perception tasks
"Dysarthric speech familiarization: Distributed practice and interleaving," spearheaded by Mik Martinelli, former linguistics grad student and now faculty at Midwestern State, and my OSU colleagues Sara Loss and Sabiha Parveen

New collaboration: Cross-cultural Communication with International Instructors

1/6/2022

I've started a new multi-site collaboration with linguistics profs at OSU (Sara Loss & Nathan Horton), Northern Arizona (Okim Kang), and Oregon (Melissa Baese-Berk) about supporting cross-cultural communication in college classrooms. We are implementing various inter-group contact activities and accent familiarization training with college freshmen and international TAs to improve inter-cultural communication, attitudes, and mutual understanding.

ASHFoundation grant proposal submitted!

4/16/2020

I have submitted a proposal for a New Investigators Research Grant, which supports one-year projects for junior faculty. This project focuses on conversations among young adults with cochlear implants and how listeners react to them.

ASHA Orlando

11/23/2019

I gave a talk "Speech Intelligibility, Deaf Speech Quality, & Personality Ratings" at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association convention in Orlando. This was my first time attending ASHA, and the first conference presentation for my long-term project about listeners' impressions of cochlear implant users. In this phase, I'm looking for cues that listeners pick up on when they perceive CI users as having some sort of accent. I had some great discussions with other attendees about my initial results, and I hope the rest of the analysis will help explain the patterns I reported in the first two papers in the project.

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