Welcome
Thank you for visiting the website for the UConn Laboratory for Spoken Language Processing, also known as the SLaP Lab.
Research in our lab examines spoken language processing to promote a theoretical understanding of the perceptual mechanisms that support listeners' ability to dynamically adapt to structured phonetic variation. Our lab broadly considers this question within the frameworks of linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. We use a variety of experimental paradigms to examine how listeners map the speech signal onto individual consonants and vowels – the building blocks of larger linguistic units such as words and phrases. We also examine factors that influence organization and retrieval of lexical items within memory.
Two crosscutting themes of our research are (1) examining how language comprehension is shaped by input in the environment for perceptual learning in the mature perceiver and plasticity underlying acquisition of speech sound categories in development, and (2) examining factors that explain individual variation in spoken language processing abilities, including variation that arises due to language disorders.
Our laboratory is supported by the National Institute On Deafness And Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R21 DC016141 and by the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences of the National Science Foundation under Award Number BCS 1827591. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation.
