CYNTHIA M. CONNINEProfessor of Psychology and Linguistics
Ph.D., University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Post-doctoral fellowships:MIT (Speech Group), Indiana University (Speech Research Laboratory)
Area: Cognitive Psychology
E-mail: connine@binghamton.edu
Phone: 607-777-2286
Office: Science IV, Room 108
Curriculum vitae (pdf)
Visiting Professor, Hangzhou University, China Key Studies Development Project (PRC); Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands and University of Aachen, Germany; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow and Visiting Professor Psychology Department, University of Aachen (RWTH), Aachen, Germany; Reviewer for over 25 additional journals; NSF and NIH Grant Review Panels.
Center for Cognitive and Psycholinguistic Sciences (CAPS)
Psycholinguistics, spoken word recognition, speech perception
Spoken language understanding is among the most sophisticated capabilities of the human brain – the physical signal (speech) is a transient event that the brain must encode in a very short period of time. In my lab, we investigate the process of recognizing words - the basic building block of spoken language understanding. Recognition of spoken words occurs against a backdrop of thousands of possible words (the average high school student knows about 60,000 words!) that might be spoken by speakers with different dialects or accents than your own (Do you speak American?). Our research focuses on the processes and representations that make this remarkable feat possible. Many of our research projects are informed by the distributional characteristics of spoken language by evaluating large corpora of spoken language conversations for patterns of word pronunciations across words and dialects. In the recent publications listed below, we have investigated questions such as: How do listeners recognize words spoken with a different accent than their own or as an infrequent pronunciation? How do listeners learn new pronunciations of a word, a new dialect or acquire language-specific properties of speech sounds? Does what you know about how a word is spelled important for recognizing the spoken form? In some of our work in collaboration with Albrecht Inhoff, we have investigated the related question of how knowing what a word sounds like influences reading. In addition to these interests in word recognition, my laboratory has examined processing of non-literal language (metaphors and idioms) during language comprehension in both the auditory and visual (reading) domain.
Graduate students are immediately involved in on-going collaborative research projects as a means for introducing them to the issues, methods and joys of research on language processing. Students are also strongly encouraged to initiate independent projects in order to explore and develop their ideas. These combined experiences are intended to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills for academic and industry positions.
The laboratory typically accepts four undergraduate research assistants each year. Undergraduates who have worked in the lab have gone on to a variety of careers that have included additional graduate training in areas such as speech and hearing, cognitive psychology, clinical psychology, law school, and school psychology. If you are interested in getting involved in research in the lab, contact me in the spring semester for consideration for the following academic year. All students are welcome to apply but the lab is particularly suited for students whose academic interests include psychology and a language related discipline (linguistics, language studies, philosophy, computer science).
(* indicates graduate student co-author; **indicates undergraduate student co-author)
*Ranbom, L. & Connine, C.M. (2007). Lexical representation of phonological variation. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 273-298.
Connine, C.M., *Ranbom, L. & Patterson, D.J. (2008). On the representation of phonological variant frequency in spoken word recognition, Perception & Psychophysics, 70(3), 403-411.
*Ranbom, L.R., Connine, C.M. & **Yudman, E. (2009). Is phonological context always used to recognize variant forms in spoken word recognition?: The role of variant frequency and context distribution. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 15(4), 1205-1220.
Connine, C.M. & **Darnieder, L.M. (2009). Perceptual learning of co-articulation in speech. Journal of Memory and Language, 61(3), 368-378.
Connine, C.M. (in press). Spoken Word Recognition. In (P.Hogan, Ed) Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language Science. Cambridge University Press.
*LoCasto, P. & Connine, C.M. (In press). Processing no-release variants in connected speech. Language and Speech.
