Graduate student studies link between speech perception and speech production
When visiting a different city or country, travelers may find themselves slipping into the local accent. Timothy Murphy wants to find out why.
Researchers have been studying this phenomenon — phonetic convergence — for years. But Murphy, a graduate student studying psychology in Carnegie Mellon University's Holt Lab, said there is currently no explanation for why an American may sound a little British after a vacation across the pond.
"It's a basic science question with a lot of different applications," Murphy said. "Most interesting to me is examining how adults are able to pronounce and understand sounds when they learn new languages."
Murphy was recently awarded the Raymond H. Stetson Scholarship in Phonetics and Speech Science from the Acoustical Society of America. The scholarship will support his quest to understand the link between speech perception (the way words are heard) and speech production (the way words are said).
"There are a lot of models that explain how people can understand other speakers when there's lots of noise in the environment or the person has an accent, but none of those models can explain how people are able to learn a new language or be able to speak a new language," Murphy explained. "People think speaking is like writing, but the process in the brain is completely different."
