Michigan State University (MSU) Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders Assistant Professor Laura Dilley is using a $460,000 stimulus grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study ways to better comprehend speech.
According to excerpts from the article:
The focus of the research of Laura Dilley, an assistant professor of communicative sciences and disorders in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, is how the acoustic properties of speech –voice pitch, loudness and speech rate – contribute to understanding spoken words.
“Pitch, loudness and rate are collectively termed prosody,” Dilley said. “Previously, these prosodic aspects of the speech signal have been assumed to play a minor role in spoken word recognition.”
However, recent research by Dilley and others suggests that prosody can have a very significant effect on how words are understood. For example, recent research by Dilley and her colleagues has shown that just changing the speech rate surrounding a word can cause that word to disappear perceptually.
Read the entire article here.
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