Professor Melinda Fricke received an Early Career Research Grant from the journal Language Learning to pursue research on bilingual speech perception in noise. The grant project, entitled “Isolating sources of the bilingual deficit in speech perception in noise”, will compare the ability of monolingual and bilingual listeners to identify words and speech sounds that are embedded in different types of noise, such as filtered white noise and competing talkers (similar to when a TV is playing in the background). Previous studies have found that bilinguals seem to be disproportionately affected by background noise, so these experiments will try to understand the many factors contributing to the bilingual deficit.
Dr. Fricke is pictured here with the students working in her lab during the Fall 2018 semester. If you would like to get involved with research in the Linguistics Lab, send an email to Dr. Fricke describing your interests. Undergraduate researchers receive course credit for Ling 1903, and will learn what it’s like to conduct research on the psycholinguistics of bilingualism.