Joanne Miller
Degrees/Education
1969 University of Minnesota B.S., Speech Pathology
1970University of Minnesota M.A., Speech Pathology
1974 University of Minnesota Ph.D., Speech Science
1974-1976 Brown University Postdoctoral Fellow, Psychology
Area(s) of Expertise
Spoken language processing
Research Interests
My research focuses on spoken language processing. Previous research in the field has shown that the acoustic form of any given word is not constant from utterance to utterance, but changes as a function of such factors as the specific talker who is speaking, the rate of speech, and the context in which the word is produced. Despite such variability, human listeners recognize spoken words with apparent ease. Our research team has used a variety of experimental paradigms to investigate the perceptual processes that underlie this ability, focusing on how listeners map the speech signal onto the sequences of phonetic segments (consonants and vowels) that comprise the lexical items of the language. The results of such investigations constrain theories of normal speech and language processing as well as theories of speech and language processing disorders, and they have implications for the development of human speech technologies.
Location
125 Nightingale Hall