Patrice (Pam) Beddor, John C. Catford Collegiate Professor of Linguistics, studies the relation between the cognitive and physical aspects of sound structures. She investigates how speakers convey, and listeners process, linguistic information, with a particular focus on the information conveyed by overlapping or coarticulated speech gestures. In one line of collaborative work she studies listeners' moment-by-moment use of coarticulatory information as it unfolds in real time. As part of this inquiry, she explores whether the time course of a listener's perception of coarticulation is linked to that individual's own production patterns. Her study of the relation between a language user's perception and production, and the complex factors that influence that relation, is motivated in part by an interest in the initiation of certain patterns of sound change. An overarching goal of this research program is to inform a more comprehensive model of the production-perception relation for coarticulated speech. In a separate line of study, she investigates, in collaboration with several graduate students, the time course of listeners' use and integration of both social and linguistic information as they make perceptual decisions.
