Dr Meghan Clayards
Meghan worked with us as an ER on Project 4 at the University of York, UK, from July 2008 - Aug 2009.
In September 2009 she took up a post doctoral fellowship with the Center for Research on Language Mind and Brain in Montreal, Canada. She was working with Dr. Linda Polka and Dr. Susan Rvachew in the School of Communication Sciences Disorders at McGill University, as well as Dr. Kristine Onishi in the Psychology Department at McGill University. Her research is on adult and child speech perception, particularily with early French-English bilinguals.
In September 2010 she was appointed as Assistant Professor at McGill university. This post is split 50:50 between Linguistics and the School of Communication Sciences Disorders.
Email: meghan.clayards@mcgill.ca
Website: www.mcgill.ca/scsd/people/faculty/meghanclayards/
I studied linguistics at the University of Victoria in Victoria, Canada and received a BSc in 2001. In 2002 I started PhD studies at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences studying speech perception, word recognition and phonetics with Mike Tanenhaus, Dick Aslin and Joyce McDonough. My thesis research has focused on what information is available in the acoustic-phonetic details of the speech signal and how, given this information, the listener’s behaviour can be modeled as maximum likelihood estimation. I have also been involved in a project investigating the integration of acoustic and visual cues. Another project monitored eye-movements during word recognition to investigate the integration of multiple acoustic cues in real time. A third ongoing project is using a combination of acoustic analysis and perceptual studies to characterize the acoustic phonetic cues to nasal consonants available over the course of the preceding vowel. My PhD was completed in June 2008.
In July 2008 I joined project 4 in York as an ER to study how people are able to appropriately use contextual variation in acoustic-phonetic speech cues while recognizing words. Specifically I am interested in whether this ability is best explained by a listener’s knowledge of the details of their linguistic environment. In general I am interested in how listeners use the variable and multidimensional acoustic signal to recognize speech in such an efficient manner and how knowledge of their native language underlies this ability.
Involved in: » Project 4: Perceptual salience of FPD: Cross-linguistic comparison of contextual sensitivity
