My research
I use a variety of methodologies to explore how children and adults learn and process complex acoustic information, especially words, and also other types of temporally-patterned stimuli such as music.
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.
Two important aspects of word recognition are PREDICTION (see Creel, Dahan, & Swingley, 2006), and INHIBITION of incorrect alternatives (work in progress), which you need when you predict incorrectly (and have to revise your word-guess accordingly). 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 cognitive control (ability to inhibit tempting but incorrect responses), and also still within the so-called “critical period” for language development (implying potentially greater malleability in learning).
Auditory perception/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 will be employing eye tracking to explore moment by moment expectations in musical stimuli. I aim to elucidate what it is that people are predicting in music, 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.
Sarah C. Creel
Assistant Professor, Cognitive Science
University of California, San Diego
Email: mylastname at cogsci.ucsd.edu
Office: Cog Sci 167, x4-7308
Fax: 858-534-1128
Publications
Creel, S. C., & Newport, E. L. (2002). Tonal profiles of artificial scales: roles of frequency and recency. Paper presented at the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Sydney, Australia, July 2002.
Creel, S. C., Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (2004). Distant melodies: Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies in tone sequences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 1119-1130.
Creel, S. C., & Newport, E. L. Tone prominence in simple melodies: disentangling the effects of frequency, position, and harmonic structure. Under revision for Music Perception.
Creel, S. C. (August 2005). The role of talker variation in lexical access. Doctoral dissertation.
Creel, S. C., Aslin, R. N., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2005). The role of consonants and vowels in learning an artificial lexicon: the effects of noise. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Plasticity in Speech Perception, London, UK.
Creel, S. C., Aslin, R. N., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2006). Acquiring an artificial lexicon: segment type and order information in early lexical entries. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 1-19.
Creel, S. C., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Aslin, R. N. (2006). Consequences of lexical stress on learning an artificial lexicon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 15-32.
Creel, S. C., Dahan, D., & Swingley, D. (2006, September). Effects of featural similarity and overlap position on lexical confusions and overt similarity judgments. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Pittsburgh, PA, US.
Creel, S. C., Aslin, R. N., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2008). Heeding the voice of experience: The role of talker variation in lexical access. Cognition, 106, 633-664.
Creel, S. C., & Dahan, D. (2008). The influence of spoken words’ temporal structure on paired-associate learning. Manuscript under review at JEP:General.
