Colloquium: Dr Melinda Fricke, "New research in the Linguistics Lab for Fall 2017: Isolating the sources of difficulty in bilingual speech perception in noise"

Melinda Fricke, with undergraduate researchers Melinda Arnold, Danny Feyler, Cecilia Jimenez, Leo Johnson, Wanyan Ma, Abby Neer, Alicia Sigmon, and Ivy Yen

This talk will feature student participants in the Linguistics Department’s Directed Undergraduate Research program who have been working under the supervision of Dr. Melinda Fricke in Fall 2017.  Work in the Linguistics Lab this semester has focused on the development of several new experiments related to the perception of speech in noise: previous research has found that bilinguals of various backgrounds experience difficulty understanding speech embedded in background noise, certainly in their second language but also perhaps in their more dominant language.  We will present some of our hypotheses for why this might be the case, as well as the experimental designs we have developed to test our hypotheses, our predictions regarding the experiment outcomes, and perhaps some pilot data.