My research

My lab

I use a variety of methodologies to explore how children and adults learn and process complex acoustic information, especially speech, and also other types of temporally-patterned stimuli such as music. My work is supported by a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1057080) and a Hellman Award.

  

Word recognition and learning.

 

I look at how the speech signal is interpreted moment-by-moment (on-line) by examining participants’ eye movements to objects as a word elapses over time. This methodology is a particularly nice way to examine the development of word recognition: assuming normal vision, anyone from late infancy through adulthood has some capacity to execute eye movements to named objects.

 

I’m interested in the development of word recognition and the specificity of memories for acoustic material in language. There are a lot of fertile questions on each of these fronts. For instance, word recognition gets faster across development, but why? Two important aspects of word recognition are PREDICTION (see Creel & Dahan, 2010), and INHIBITION of incorrect alternatives. Both processes are central to a number of models of word recognition, developed primarily from adult data. Relatively unexplored is how prediction and inhibition take place in people--preschoolers--who are both immature in terms of inhibitory control, and are also relatively new language learners, implying potentially greater malleability in learning.

 

My work on representational specificity (Creel, Aslin, & Tanenhaus, 2008, Cognition; Creel, Aslin, & Tanenhaus, in press, Language and Cognitive Processes; Creel & Bregman, 2011, Language and Linguistics Compass; Creel & Tumlin, in press, JML) has investigated whether listeners store acoustic properties of words they hear and use those properties in on-line recognition. The short story is that they do use acoustic properties (talker variability) in recognizing words on-line. The longer story, of course, is how they manage to do this, and how it evolves over the course of development (see Creel, in press, Child Development!). Various developmental studies and nonlinguistic auditory studies are underway.

 

Auditory perception and music cognition.

 

My overarching goal in the realm of music perception is to uncover potentially common processes across the seemingly separate domains of language and music. For instance, certain word segmentation phenomena have nonspeech auditory analogues (see Creel, Newport, & Aslin, 2004). Also like language, prediction is a core component of music perception, perhaps contributing to enjoyment by creating moments of expectation/tension alternating with fulfillment/relaxation/stability (see Meyer’s 1967 Music, the Arts and Ideas). In addition to using traditional musical methodologies, I employ eye tracking to explore moment-by-moment expectations in musical events (Creel & Tumlin, in press, Cognitive Science). I aim to elucidate what it is that people are predicting in music (see Creel, 2011, JEPHPP), how they learn to do it (from periodic environmental sounds? distributions of tone frequencies of occurrence? tone orders?), and how this learning interacts with enjoyment of a piece of music or musical genre.