The Speech Perception and Acoustics Laboratories (SPA Labs) is a research unit dedicated to studying fundamental acoustic and perceptual properties of human speech and phonetic category learning. Dynamic events in speech gained a focal position in research on speech perception and acoustics of the past few decades. Despite tremendous progress of the field, there are still questions to be answered and processes to be discovered. Our mission is to make a contribution to a better understanding of complexity of speech.

In our approach to characterizing speech dynamics, we study acoustic segmental variation as a function of several factors including prosody, speech tempo and differences in segmental structure related to speaker dialect and age. We also address the development of dynamic phonetic categories by children and second language learners.

Our current questions pertaining to the perception of dynamic events center on the notion of cross-generational vowel change in certain regional dialects in the United States. Given the differences in vowel-inherent spectral change in children's and adults' productions and dialect-specific variations, how does the exposure to these features affect their respective abilities to identify vowels of their own dialect? What is the use of spectral dynamics in identifying vowels from a non-native dialect and non-native language? How much is intelligibility of a segment affected by background noise or multitalker babble? These and other questions are currently being pursued in a number of perception experiments.