cbest

Username: cbest

Participant details

	Network Member	Catherine T. Best
	Organisation/Institution	University of Western Sydney
	Department/Centre	MARCS Auditory Laboratories
	Lab	MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney
	Website	http://marcs.uws.edu.au/people/best/index.htm
	Research area	Psychology Psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics - Psycholinguistics
	Research keywords

Research Interests

My research centers on how native language experience shapes listeners' categorisation and discrimination of non-native phonetic contrasts. The focus is on how language-specific experience influences adult speech perception, and how it emerges in infant speech perception. My underlying theoretical perspective derives from articulatory phonology (Browman & Goldstein) and the direct realist assumptions of ecological psychology (Gibson, Fowler, Turvey). The working premise is that what perceivers detect in speech, both native and nonnative, is information about the articulatory patterns that produced the (multi-modal) signal. As percievers establish knowledge of the underlying organisation of articulatory patterns the native language, they increasingly tend to seek familiar (native) articulatory patterns even in unfamiliar (nonnative) speech. Thus, systematic variations in nonnative speech perception provide a window on the articulatory basis of the native phonological system. Following from this ecological/articulatory viewpoint, my research also extends to questions of whether and how articulatory information affects the perception of phonological commonalities between spoken and printed utterances (cross-modal priming), of whether users of signed languages perceive phonological contrasts and lexical items in terms of articulatory principles, and how infants' recognition of familiar words is affected by the unfamiliar articulatory patterns of non-experienced dialects of their native language. More recently, I have begun to to investigate complementary effects of musical-culture experience on perception of musical structure, such as native versus nonnative rhythmical patterns.

Member for: 5 years 7 months 3 days