The Speech Perception and Production Lab asks how people perceive and produce speech, with a particular focus on communication across diverse language backgrounds. We conduct laboratory phonology and psycholinguistic experiments looking at speech perception and production and acoustic-phonetic analyses of speech.

Our work does not end in the laboratory. Each research project includes a plan for dissemination outside of the laboratory and outside of academia. We care deeply about the values of science communication and practice these skills in our lab, alongside the technical and scientific skills we develop.

We are committed to representing linguistic diversity and diversity more broadly in the research, teaching, and outreach that emerges from our lab. For our lab, this includes: recruiting undergraduate and graduate students from diverse backgrounds with diverse skills, encouraging a diversity of research topics for students in the laboratory, considering our own positions as researchers and how these positions impact our work, and reading and citing a diversity of scholars, among many others. In addition to representing diversity and improving inclusion in the lab and our work, we strive to improve access to our work and to our lab.

The lab is directed by Prof. Melissa Baese-Berk. Our work is currently supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS 1734166; BCS 2017285, BCS 2020805, BCS 1941739, IIS 2024926), by a grant to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and by an Opportunity Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

You can learn more about who we are and what we do by exploring the different sections of this site. If you are a University of Chicago undergraduate who is interested in language and looking for research experience, make sure to check out the volunteer opportunities in the Get Involved section. If you are a non-native English speaker willing to help us by serving as a paid study participant, please check out ways to participate in experiments in the Get Involved section.