Undergraduate Student: Communication Sciences and Disorders, minoring in Psychology and Rehabilitation and Human Services
Biography:
My name is Hailey Atiyeh and I’m a junior studying Communication Sciences and Disorders with a double minor in Psychology and Rehabilitation and Human Services. My plans post graduation are to attend graduate school for Speech Language Pathology and eventually work with children in an elementary school setting. Outside of the lab, I enjoy hiking, watching movies, and volunteering with the Penn State Dance Marathon!
Project Summary:
This summer, I will be traveling to Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands to conduct research on Dutch-English bilinguals and their abstract representations of sounds that occur in the L2, but not in the L1. I will be focusing on the difficulty of perceiving the vowel /æ/, which occurs in English, but not in Dutch. The goal is to manipulate the vowels of two talkers in words containing /æ/, /ɛ/, and /ɪ/ and see if the acoustic contrast drives the difficulty of distinguishing the vowels or if more abstract lexical representations contribute to this difficulty.