The relationship between speech production and perception in Australian language speakers: implications for speech development and learning in Aboriginal children. Chronic ear infection blights the life of at least 50% of Aboriginal Australians. In a vicious cycle that extends from generation to generation, it leads to hearing loss, educational disadvantage, socio-economic disadvantage and environmental depredation, which once again leads to ear (and many other) infections. This is a unique atte ....The relationship between speech production and perception in Australian language speakers: implications for speech development and learning in Aboriginal children. Chronic ear infection blights the life of at least 50% of Aboriginal Australians. In a vicious cycle that extends from generation to generation, it leads to hearing loss, educational disadvantage, socio-economic disadvantage and environmental depredation, which once again leads to ear (and many other) infections. This is a unique attempt by researchers across academic disciplines to study the role of language in educational disadvantage and whether this disadvantage might be made worse for Aboriginal children by the early use of English at school. We ask whether, on purely acoustic or linguistic grounds, communicating in an Aboriginal language might offer improved educational and health outcomes for Aboriginal children in the early years.Read moreRead less
The effects of sentence structure on consonant and vowel articulations. Whilst machine-generated speech is generally of good quality at the level of the single word, it is noticeably less natural-sounding at the level of the sentence. This project examines an important aspect of the naturalness of human speech, namely, the effect that sentence structure has on individual consonants and vowels. A break-down of this naturalness is seen in some speakers who have suffered traumatic brain injury: suc ....The effects of sentence structure on consonant and vowel articulations. Whilst machine-generated speech is generally of good quality at the level of the single word, it is noticeably less natural-sounding at the level of the sentence. This project examines an important aspect of the naturalness of human speech, namely, the effect that sentence structure has on individual consonants and vowels. A break-down of this naturalness is seen in some speakers who have suffered traumatic brain injury: such speakers perform well when asked to utter a short word, but struggle when asked to produce a longer string of sounds. A better understanding of the interaction between speech sounds and sentence structure will lead to improvements in the treatment of speech disorders, and in the quality of human-machine communication.Read moreRead less
Understanding different speakers vs. different accents: apples and apples or apples and pears? This project will examine how human infants, human adults and songbirds learn the variability in the speech signal and will show whether the underlying skills are uniquely human and specific to certain languages. Converging data using innovative technologies will reveal the details of speech comprehension, an important component of human cognition.
Phonological effects on the development of inflectional morphology. This project investigates the mechanisms underlying typically developing children's variable omission of inflectional morphemes (for example, plural, past tense). The results will have significant implications for the evaluation and design of interventions for language-delayed populations where serious problems of communication persist.