The Union College Psychology Department Speaker Series and Honors Colloquium welcome
Kristin Van Engen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University
for a public lecture entitled
Speech communication across accents
Mismatched accents among interlocutors can be a significant source of difficulty in speech communication, particularly when the intended message of a speaker is not correctly understood by a listener. However, even when a speaker is highly intelligible to a listener, unfamiliar accents generally impose greater cognitive demands than familiar accents. This presentation will review research from our lab that measures this work and investigates how the process of speech recognition changes in response to the presence or expectation of an unfamiliar accent. This work
highlights the challenges, complexity, and promise of adapting to speakers who sound different from us.