Jeremy Steffman

Northwestern University, Dept. of Linguistics

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Northwestern Dept. of Linguistics
2016 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208


CV                 

Hello and welcome to my website!

I am a phonetician/ laboratory-phonologist/ psycholinguist/ cognitive-scientist. And a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University where I work in the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab.
Prior to this, I received my PhD in Linguistics from UCLA in December 2020.

My research centers on examining how prosodic and intonational patterns influence speech perception and spoken language processing, especially in the perception of speech timing, and the uptake of segmental information. My dissertation explores one domain where these questions are especially interesting.

More broadly, I research speech perception and prosody (production and perception). In another strand of research, I describe phonetic structure and patterns in language, mostly from acoustic data.

Check out the vita tab for a full list of publications and presentations. Scroll down for a list of recent activities, and some current projects. Don't hesitate to email me for pdfs of any posters or slides.

Recent and upcoming

• Myself and Jennifer Cole have a new paper out in JASA-EL. We introduce an algorithm to help detect F0 measurement errors, using physiologically-informed thresholds from maximum rates of F0 change in the speech production literature. This may be useful to you if you do any research that involves measuring F0! Check it out here.
• Colleagues and I have an illustration of the IPA accepted to JIPA, describing San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec:
  
  Cortés, F., Mantenuto, I. & Steffman, J. San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec. Journal of the International Phonetic Association.
• Sahyang Kim, Taehong Cho, Sun-Ah Jun and I have just published our paper Prosodic phrasing mediates listeners’ perception of temporal cues: Evidence from the Korean Accentual Phrase in Journal of Phonetics. This project is one of my favorites, and shows prosodic phrasing plays a role in perception that is independent of speech rate normalization effects - Check it out: [preprint] [link].
• Hironori Katsuda and I published a study which shows Japanese listeners process segments and lexical pitch accent differently in spoken word recognition- check it out [here].

Some current projects

• The impact of vowel-initial glottalization as a prominence cue in vowel perception and online processing. See [here] for a manuscript.
• The role of different aspects of phonological and lexical organization in speech perception: disentangling and comparing the influence of biphone probability and neighborhood density in phonetic categorization, and online processing using eyetracking - in collaboration with Megha Sundara. See [here] for a manuscript.
• The influence of intonational structure and context on listeners' perception of durational cues, and processing of pitch accent in word recognition in Tokyo Japanese - in collaboration with Hironori Katsuda.
• The articulation and acoustics of voiced aspirated sounds in Yemba (Dschang), a language spoken in Cameroon - in collaboration with Matt Faytak and Rolain Tankou. Yemba has voiced and fully aspirated (not breathy-voiced) segments, for example [ndʰù] 'distant relative' (n.b. NOT [ndʱù]), cf. [ndù] 'river'.
  
  We're using EGG to explore laryngeal articulation and timing patterns for voicing in these segments. We're also intersted in how voice quality for voiced+aspirated sounds differs from their unaspirated counterparts. To this end, we're analyzing acoustic voice quality measures in tandem with EGG parameters. See [here] for a recent presentation.
• Phonetic structure in San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec, including the realization of so-called rearticulated vowels and glottalization - in collaboration with Jae Weller, Iara Mantenuto and Félix Cortés.