Denis Burnham

Username: Denis Burnham

Participant details

	Network Member	Denis Burnham
	Organisation/Institution	University of Western Sydney
	Department/Centre	MARCS Auditory Laboratories
	Lab
	Website	http://marcs.uws.edu.au/people/burnham/index.htm
	Research area	Psychology Language Development
	Research keywords

Research Interests

My research concerns speech perception and its development. (1) Ontogenetic studies include infants' development of language specific speech perception - perceptual selectivity for distinctive characteristics of their ambient language (and the filtering of irrelevant non-native speech characteristics); the relative salience of phonetic and prosodic information in infant speech perception (and in parents' infant-directed speech); and the effect of speech perception ability on vocabulary development. (2) Cross-language studies (Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Thai, Swedish etc.) are concerned with the relationship between language specific speech perception and reading development; the relative salience of phones and lexical tone; and the lexical tone/music perception relationship. (3) Audio-visual (AV) speech processing studies include the development of AV speech perception in infants; the effect of language background and age on the use of AV speech information; and the visual perception and production of tone information. (4) As Director of MARCS Auditory Laboratories I am also involved in various other related projects, e.g., reading speed and comprehension of captions in the hearing impaired; mother-infant interaction; and evaluation of text-to-speech systems. These research areas relate generally to the theme of how the developing human adapts to the variability of speech input, how machines might do the same, and has implications for models of variability adaptation. The role of multimodal information in speech perception is a theme throughout my research.