Biography:
I am a junior studying at Penn State's University Park campus. Before starting at Penn
State, I spent several years working in various levels of the hospitality industry in Europe. My hobbies include language learning and playing the guitar and bass. I'm also an avid fan of soccer and cinema. After completing my undergraduate studies I hope to enter medical school.
Project Summary
My PIRE project is based on the Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (ISIB). This benefit means that two speakers of a second language are better at speech processing when they share a common native language. My research aims to explore the extent of this benefit, and how it applies to the Spanish language, which has many different accents and regional dialects. Specifically. I will research the connection between the Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit and background noise when speaker-listener pairs speak the same first language but with differing regional accents through the use of several behavioral tasks. By gathering this data from monolingual Mexican-Spanish speaking participants, along with several peers who will be conducting parallel research elsewhere in the Spanish speaking world, we hope to better understand the ISIB and its effects within languages that contain similar accent and dialectal variations.