Research Interests

My general research interest is the understanding of the processes of speech production and speech perception. My speech production research focuses on the control of vocal tract and facial motion: what are the units of coordination; how are sequences of actions implemented; what form do the central commands take in fluent speech. I use a number of techniques to gather physiological data, including electromyography, kinematic analysis of OPTOTRAK data, and image processing of X-ray images from the X-ray Film Database.

My speech perception research focuses on audiovisual integration during face-to-face communication: what are the visual cues for individual speech sounds; what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for audiovisual fusion; what patterns of eye movements are observed during face-to-face communication. In this area, much of our work has focused on the McGurk effect.

Recently, I have begun a project on facial and vocal tract modeling. The purpose of the work is to produce realistic facial animations that can be used in controlled audiovisual experiments and to generate models which summarize our knowledge of the speech production process.