Our Research

We study the cognitive and social mechanisms that underlie how we understand spoken language. Spoken language is a highly complex signal that conveys information not only about objects and events in the world but also information about who is talking. How do listeners integrate these two types of information? Despite the vast amount of variability in the production of words across different voices and communicative contexts, listeners often understand spoken utterances with seemingly little effort. Our research explores how we achieve this perceptual feat.

Our work has shown that variation in pronunciation, which stems from many social factors, such as age, gender, and region of origin, facilitates our organization of speech sounds in memory and shapes our expectations for what we hear. Below, we highlight the current research trajectories in the lab.

How does information about who is talking affect what we hear?

Understanding spoken language often requires listeners to process not only the words and sentences that they hear but information about who is talking. With accumulated experience hearing speech by multiple individuals and groups of individuals who share socio-linguistic characteristics (e.g., native language) comes expectations about how previously unheard talkers might sound. Our work explores how listeners' expectations, biases, and stereotypes about who is speaking can change what listeners think they hear. Current questions we are asking on this topic include: Does knowing someone's race or ethnicity affect how comprehensible or non-native accented you think they sound? How does a listener's own experience hearing non-native accented speech affect their speech perception?

How do we learn to understand unfamiliar pronunciations?

With experience hearing different voices, we enhance our ability to discriminate speech sounds. Exposure to a non-native accent, for example, improves one's ability to understand it. This perceptual learning process implies that listeners constantly update their mental representations of speech sounds to better understand unfamiliar pronunciations. A key outstanding question is how listeners do this. Current questions we are asking include: Do listeners learn to understand unfamiliar pronunciations regardless of where their attention is directed when they are listening to speech? What kind of exposure yields learning that facilitates the comprehension of unfamiliar voices and utterances?

Selected Publications

For a complete list of publications, please visit Dr. Tzeng's Google Scholar Profile
*Indicates student co-author

Koo, H., Kataoka, R., Swan, J.T., & Tzeng, C.Y. (in press). Effects of lexical frequency on the post-exposure

magnitude of recalibration in lexically guided perceptual learning: An explorative analysis. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Tzeng, C.Y., & Nygaard, L. C., & Theodore, R.M. (2021). A second chance for a first impression: Sensitivity to cumulative input statistics for lexically guided perceptual learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 28, 1003–1014.

Nygaard, L. C., & Tzeng, C. Y. (2021). Perceptual integration of linguistic and nonlinguistic properties of speech. In Pardo, J. S., Nygaard, L. C., Pisoni, D. B., & Remez, R. E. (Eds.) The Handbook of Speech Perception, Second Edition. Wiley.

Tzeng, C. Y., Namy, L. L., & Nygaard, L. C. (2019). Communicative context affects the use of referential prosody. Cognitive Science, 43, 1 – 20.

Tzeng, C. Y., *Duan, J., Namy, L. L., & Nygaard, L. C. (2017). Prosody in speech as a source of referential information. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33, 512 – 526.

Tzeng, C. Y., Nygaard, L. C., & Namy, L. L. (2017). Developmental change in children’s sensitivity to sound symbolism. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 160, 107 – 118.

Tzeng, C. Y., Alexander, J. E. D., Sidaras, S. K., & Nygaard, L. C. (2016). The role of training structure in perceptual learning of accented speech. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42, 1793 –1805.

Tzeng, C.Y., Nygaard, L. C., & Namy, L. L. (2016). The specificity of sound symbolic correspondences in spoken language. Cognitive Science, 33, 1 – 30.

Suppes, A., Tzeng, C. Y., & Galguera, L. G. (2015). Using and seeing co-speech gesture in a spatial task. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 39, 241 – 257.

Selected Recent Conference Presentations

*Indicates student co-author

Atamna, B.*, & Tzeng, C.Y. (2022, April). Understanding varied pronunciations in spoken language: The role of task-driven attention. Poster presented at SJSU Spartan Psychological Association Research Conference and at the SJSU College of Social Sciences Dean's Student Colloquium.

Quintero, U.*, & Tzeng, C.Y. (2022, April). How does information about who is talking affect what you hear? Poster presented at SJSU Spartan Psychological Association Research Conference

and at the SJSU College of Social Sciences Dean's Student Colloquium.

Tzeng, C.Y. (2021, June). Online speech perception experiments: Democratizing science and teaching. Talk presented at the virtual BeOnline Meeting.

Tzeng, C.Y., & Nygaard, L. C., & Theodore, R.M. (2020, December). A second chance for a first impression: Lexically guided perceptual learning reflects cumulative experience with a talker’s phonetic input. Poster presented at the Virtual Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

Tzeng, C. Y., *Vazquez, V., & Nygaard, L. C. (2019, November). Expectations about talker identity reshape listeners’ phonetic categories. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Montreal, Canada.

Nygaard, L. C. & Tzeng, C. Y. (2019, May). Specificity and generalization in perceptual adaptation to systematic variation in speech. Paper presented at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Louisville, KY.

Tzeng, C. Y. & Nygaard, L. C. (2018, November). The role of distributional information in cross-talker generalization of phonetic category retuning. Poster presented at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Victoria, BC, Canada.