Research themes
- Neurocognitive studies of Speech Prosody: these studies are advancing knowledge of how emotive meanings in speech are expressed and understood through prosody (e.g., by identifying which acoustic and perceptual parameters are involved) as well as shedding light on the cognitive and neural mechanisms specialized for prosodic aspects of communication. Learn about the Facial Affect Decision Task (FADT) here.
- Cross-cultural Studies of Vocal Emotion Recognition: these studies are investigating whether individuals from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds can recognize 'basic' emotions, such as joy, anger, or fear, from vocal attributes of speech.
- Communication in Parkinson’s Disease: these investigations are looking at how Parkinson’s disease affects nonverbal, nonliteral, and emotive forms of communication, and by inference, what role the basal ganglia may play in these communicative functions.
- Construction of prosody inventories and Relational Inference in Social Communication (RISC) Video Database: as we pursue our various research themes, our lab has contributed to the development of new audio and audiovisual materials that are used in our research, and are freely available to other researchers upon request.
Back to top