Current Research

Processing Fluency and Speaker Perceptions

​Listeners must use their (limited) attentional resources to make sense of what they hear. Because of this social information about the speaker can influence how difficult we expect listening to someone will be. For example, most native speakers expect to use more attentional resources to listen to a non-native accented speaker than a native accented speaker. In this study, we investigate how these perceptions influence how listeners process speech. ​Data collection is currently underway. Please see Student Research below if interested in helping with this project!

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Influence of Race-Related Voice and Visual Cues on Language Processing

​This project investigates how perceived voice (African American speaker, European American speaker) and visual cues (African American face, European American face) influence the processing of sentences which differ in their plausibility. Data collection for an eye-tracking task is currently underway. Please see Student Research below if interested in helping with this project!

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Previous Research

Phonetic Characteristics of African American English Stressed ​BIN​

The tense and aspect system of African American English is more complex than that of Standard American English. For example, African American English can indicate the remote past by adding phonetic stress to the word BIN as in 
'Chad BIN helping his grandmother' 
​(which is glossed in Standard American English as 'Chad has been helping his grandmother for a long time'). While the grammatical features of BIN are well understood, the phonetic characteristics that differentiate stressed BIN from unstressed been are not. Data collection and analysis is currently underway.

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Student Research

Research is the foundation of psychological science and an important component of any psychology major's undergraduate career.

Please fill out this form if you are interested in:

• Helping with an existing research project as a research assistant, or
• Developing your own independent study.

​Samples of prior independent student work can be found here.

**I will be taking on one to two research assistants next term.**

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Selected Conference Posters, Presentations, and Publications

Posters
Beyer, T.,  *Boninger, A., & *Michael, S. (2016, March). Social Influences on Language Processing. Poster presented at the 30th Annunal CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Massachusetts Institute for Technology, Boston, MA.
Beyer, T.,  *Boninger, A., & *Michael, S. (2016, September). Social Influences on Language Processing. Poster presented at the Linking social effects in language processing to social effects in language evolution, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Beyer, T., Edwards*, K., & Fuller*, C. (2015, October). Processing across language varieties: the misinterpretation of African American English BIN by adult speakers of Standard American English. Poster presented at the 44th Annual New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Beyer, T., & Hudson Kam, C. L. (2015, May). Mere exposure may not lead to bidialectal competence. Poster presented at the 11th Annual Symposium of the Centre for Intercultural Language Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. 
Beyer, T., & Hudson Kam, C. L. (2006, March). Comparing off- and on-line measures of AAE- and SAE-speaking children’s comprehension of SAE tense. Poster presented at the On-line Methods in Children’s Language Processing, City University New York. 

Presentations
Beyer, T., *Edwards, K., & *Fuller, C. (March, 2014). Flipping the Script: The Interpretation of African American English by Speakers of Standard American English. Paper presented at the Georgetown University Roundtable (GURT), Washington, D.C.
Beyer, T., & Hudson Kam, C. L. (2007, November). The Comprehension of Standard American English Morphology by 6- and 7-year-old Speakers of African American English. Paper presented at the 32nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA.

​Publications
Beyer, T., *Edwards, K. A., & *Fuller, C. C. (2015). Misinterpretation of African American English BIN by Adult Speakers of Standard American English. Language and Communication, 45, 59-69, doi: 10.1016/j.langcom.2015.09.001
Beyer, T., & Hudson Kam, C. (2012). First and second graders’ interpretation of Standard American English morphology across varieties of English. First Language, 32, 208-227.
Beyer, T., & Hudson Kam, C. (2009). Some cues are stronger than others: The (non)interpretation of 3rd person present –s as a tense marker by 6- and 7-year-olds. First Language, 29, 209-228.
Beyer, T., & Hudson Kam, C. (2008). The role of orthographic gender in cognition. Technical Report, CRL-0802. La Jolla, CA: University of California, San Diego, Center for Research in Language.

* Denotes Student Author