We welcome new lab manager, Hannah Mechtenberg, who joins us from Colorado.  She got her BS in Neuroscience from Colorado State University, and is eager to begin work in the LAB lab.

It’s been a busy few months in the lab.  A few exciting items:

We are delighted to congratulate Dr. Stephanie Del Tufo, who successfully defended her PhD thesis, entitled, “The Hyperplasticity Hypothesis: Speech Encoding and Plasticity in Typical and Dyslexic Readers.”  Stephanie has gone on to a postdoc with Laurie Cutting at Vanderbilt. Congrats, Steph!

Further, we’re also happy to congratulate Dr. Sayako Earle on the successful defense of her PhD thesis, entitled, ” Nonnative Phonetic Learning in Adults With and Without Language Impairment.”  Sayako begins a faculty position at the University of Delaware this Fall.  Congrats, Sayako!

We’re also saying goodbye to Xin Xie, a recent graduate who is headed off for a postdoc with Florian Jaeger at Rochester University, and Iliana Meza-Gonzalez, who is leaving the program for greener pastures (and better climates). And Alexis Johns, who is off to a postdoc at Brandeis.

We wish all of our lab-mates well, and we’ll miss you! Don’t forget to come back and visit.

Stay tuned for an announcement soon about new folks joining the lab soon.

Alexis Johns successfully defended her dissertation, “Sensory and Cognitive Influences on Lexical Competition in Spoken Word Recognition in Younger and Older Listeners”, co-supervised by Emily Myers and Jim Magnuson. She leaves us soon for a postdoc with Arthur Wingfield at Brandeis.  Congrats to Alexis!

A few items from the past few months:

• A paper we’ve been excited about for a long time has appeared in press–this is part of Sayako’s dissertation work:
  • Earle, F. S., & Myers, E. B. (2015). Sleep and native language interference affect non-native speech sound learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 41(6), 1680–1695. http://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000113
• Emily recently received an NSF CAREER award.  We’re really excited to begin work on this project. Press here.
• There are other big changes on the horizon for LABlab members–but that post will wait.

Congrats to Xin Xie for successfully defending a monster of a dissertation (nine experiments, folks) titled “Phonetic Adaptation to Foreign Accented Speech.”

We are delighted to announce that Sayako Earle has been awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (better known as an NRSA) from the NIH/NIDCD.

Congrats to Sayako, who successfully defended her plans for a dissertation tackling the role of sleep in speech sound learning across typical and disordered populations.

Jennifer Mozeiko and Iliana Meza-Gonzalez were on hand to watch a crew and a giant crane gently swing our new toy into the building.

Xin Xie has published some of her work on talker identification in JASA.  She’s shown that musical experience (and associated non-linguistic abilities in pitch processing) show a strong relationship to non-native talker identification.  Online at JASA.

We’ve got a new paper out in JASA reporting on the conditions that are required for learners to generalize learning of a non-native contrast from a trained talker to a novel talker  (spoiler alert: sleep matters).

• Earle, F.S., & Myers, E.B. (2014).  Overnight consolidation promotes generalization across talkers in the identification of nonnative speech sounds. JASA-EL (Vol.137, No.1).  DOI: 10.1121/1.4903918