Biography:
I grew up in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, which doesn’t mean much to some people and may seem exotic to others. Possibly due to my West Virginian roots, I love outdoor activities like camping and hiking; one of my favorite things to do is to sit around a campfire with friends and enjoy the peaceful beauty of nature. Chickfila is my greatest weakness. I’ve worked there for nearly four years now and still have not grown tired of the food. Also, I love coffee. Not your typical sugar-filled, frothy latte kind of coffee, though – Black, pour-over coffee is the way to go. Besides those things, I like to read when I have time, but I look forward to each day as a new opportunity to make memories with old friends and new.
Project Summary:
The purpose of my project is to investigate the properties of speech perception and the generalization of novel speech features, namely unusual realizations of phones, to the speech of other individuals. It is designed to explore how second language listeners perceptually adjust to unfamiliar realizations of sounds in the speech of one talker and investigate whether or not this perceptual learning is applied to the speech of the next person. I will be conducting this study in Nijmegan, The Netherlands.