Navin Viswanathan (Director)
My research focuses on understanding Speech Perception and Production within the general framework of Perception, Action and Cognition. Broadly, I attempt to develop techniques to study spoken language processes in ecologically typical conditions of language use. The central question of my interest is how listeners achieve stable speech perception despite a widely varying speech signal.
Doctoral Students
Tifani Biro
Tifani is currently completing her PhD in Communication Sciences & Disorders at Penn State. Tifani graduated from the Villanova University in 2016 with a Master’s of Science in Psychology. At Villanova, she completed thesis research with Dr. Joseph Toscano, studying how experimental environment influences phonetic convergence (changing one’s speech sound to match another’s) among interlocutors. Tifani’s current research expands upon this work and focuses on how experimenters can increase task naturalness in psycholinguistic experiments using virtual systems. She is also interested in computational modeling and cognitive neuroscience.
Brittany Williams
My research interests include speech perception and production; audiovisual speech; and psycholinguistics. Currently, my research focuses on the effect adverse listening conditions (e.g., background noise, competing accented speech, and differing spatial locations) have on speech perception. I aim to identify how listeners use linguistic and nonlinguistic cues to process speech. This will aid in our understanding of how individuals are efficient and resilient in perceiving speech despite variability in the acoustic signal. For more information about me, please visit my website.