Word Familiarity in English and German
In this small project I am collecting word familiarity ratings for English and German words that I used in my dissertation, in order to investigate correlations between lexical frequency and word familiarity. A big part of this project has been developing an online survey to collect the ratings. (The survey is still in preparation)
Emerging neighborhoods
I am also working on another project with Adam Buchwald investigating spoken word recognition. As far as I know, my dissertation was the first study to investigate open-response spoken word recognition using multisyllabic words. However, in that study I used only disyllabic words. In this project, we are using a very large stimulus set (1440 words), which have been designed to be a representative sample of the entire English lexicon, based on measures such as syllable structure, lexical frequency, and neighborhood density.
As opposed to most theories of neighborhood density, which a priori define the definition of neighbor, we are using this large dataset to allow the properties of neighbors to emerge.
PRESTO — Perceptually Robust English Sentence Test (Open-set)
My newest project is in collaboration with Dr. Hanyong Park and Prof. David Pisoni. In this project we are developing a new test of spoken word recognition — the Perceptually Robust English Sentence Test (Open-set). This test is designed to be a more accurate reflection of the task demands of spoken word recognition in everyday communicative contexts. While most clinical tests of spoken word recognition (also known as speech audiometry) use a single speaker, and highly controlled materials, we are developing a test with many different speakers from a variety of different dialect regions across the United States, and using sentences which vary widely in semantic content and syntactic structure.