Jeremy Steffman

Northwestern University, Dept. of Linguistics

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


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Hello and welcome to my website!

I'm 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

• Colleagues and I published a meta-analysis of infant phonotactic learning in Cognition - check it out here:
  
  Sundara, M., Zhou, Z.L., Breiss, C., Katsuda, H. & Steffman, J. (2022). Infants' developing sensitivity to native language phonotactics: A meta-analysis. [link]
• Collaborators and myself will present the following at LabPhon:
  
  “Phonetic cues to prominence in segmental perception and online processing: The case of vowel-initial glottalization in American English.”
  
  “Nuclear Tunes lost and found: Modeling intonational tunes in American English with labeled vs. unlabeled data.” (With Jennfier Cole, Lisa Cox and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel)
• Collaborators and myself will present the following at Speech Prosody:
  
  “Shape matters: Machine classification and listeners’ perceptual discrimination of American English intonational tunes.” (With Jennifer Cole and Sam Tilsen) [proceedings]
  
  “The rise and fall of American English pitch accents: Evidence from an imitation study of rising nuclear tunes.” (With Jennifer Cole and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel) [proceedings]

Some current projects

• 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 tonal cues to prosodic phrasing on the perception of segmental contrasts in Seoul Korean, as a function of domain initial strengthening - in collaboration with Sahyang Kim, Taehong Cho and Sun-Ah Jun. 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.