Michael Studdert-Kennedyhttp://www.haskins.yale.edu/staff/msk.html is an eminent psychologist and speech scientist. He is well known for his contributions to studies of speech perception

Speech perception

Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology...

, the motor theory of speech perception

Motor theory of speech perception

thumb|250px|right|When we hear [[speech|spoken words]] we sense that they are made of auditory [[sound]]s. The motor theory of speech perception argues that behind the sounds we hear are the intended movements of the [[vocal tract]] that [[pronunciation|pronounces]] them.The motor theory of speech...

, and the evolution of language

Evolutionary linguistics

Evolutionary linguistics is the scientific study of the origins and development of language. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves practically no traces. This led to an abandonment of the field for more than a century...

, among other areas. He is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

 at the University of Connecticut

University of Connecticut

The admission rate to the University of Connecticut is about 50% and has been steadily decreasing, with about 28,000 prospective students applying for admission to the freshman class in recent years. Approximately 40,000 prospective students tour the main campus in Storrs annually...

 and a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. He is the former President(1986-1992) of Haskins Laboratories

Haskins Laboratories

Haskins Laboratories is an independent, international, multidisciplinary community of researchers conducting basic research on spoken and written language. Founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut since 1970, Haskins Laboratories is a private, non-profit research institute with a...

 in New Haven, Connecticut

New Haven, Connecticut

New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...

. He is also a member of the Haskins Laboratories

Haskins Laboratories

Haskins Laboratories is an independent, international, multidisciplinary community of researchers conducting basic research on spoken and written language. Founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut since 1970, Haskins Laboratories is a private, non-profit research institute with a...

 Board of Directorshttp://www.haskins.yale.edu/board.html and was Chairman of the Board from 1988 until 2001.

Career

Michael Studdert-Kennedy's early work at Haskins Laboratories

Haskins Laboratories

Haskins Laboratories is an independent, international, multidisciplinary community of researchers conducting basic research on spoken and written language. Founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut since 1970, Haskins Laboratories is a private, non-profit research institute with a...

 included work on their reading machine

Reading machine

A reading machine is a piece of Assistive Technology that allows blind people to access printed materials. It scans text, converts the image into text by means of optical character recognition and uses a speech synthesizer to read out what it has found....

 project. In the 1960s, Studdert-Kennedy and Donald Shankweiler

Donald Shankweiler

Donald P. Shankweiler is an eminent psychologist and cognitive scientist who has done pioneering work on the representation and processing of language in the brain...

http://www.haskins.yale.edu/staff/shankweiler.html used a dichotic listening

Dichotic listening

In cognitive psychology, dichotic listening is a procedure commonly used to investigate selective attention in the auditory system. In dichotic listening, two different auditory stimuli are presented to the participant simultaneously, one to each ear, normally using a set of headphones...

 technique (presenting different nonsense syllables simultaneously to opposite ears) to demonstrate the dissociation of phonetic (speech) and auditory (nonspeech) perception by finding that phonetic structure devoid of meaning is an integral part of language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

, typically processed in the left cerebral hemisphere. Alvin Liberman

Alvin Liberman

Alvin Meyer Liberman was an American psychologist whose ideas set the agenda for fifty years of research in the psychology of speech perception and laid the groundwork for modern computer speech synthesis and the understanding of critical issues in cognitive science...

, Franklin S. Cooper

Franklin S. Cooper

Franklin Seaney Cooper was an American physicist and inventor who was a pioneer in speech research.-Biography:...

, Shankweiler, and Studdert-Kennedy summarized and interpreted fifteen years of research in "Perception of the Speech Code," still among the most cited papers in the speech literature. It set the agenda for many years of research at Haskins and elsewhere by describing speech as a code in which speakers overlap (or coarticulate

Coarticulation

Coarticulation in its general sense refers to a situation in which a conceptually isolated speech sound is influenced by, and becomes more like, a preceding or following speech sound...

) segments to form syllables. In recent years he has written a number of papers on the evolution of language

Evolutionary linguistics

Evolutionary linguistics is the scientific study of the origins and development of language. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves practically no traces. This led to an abandonment of the field for more than a century...

, including work with Louis Goldstein

Louis M. Goldstein

Louis M. Goldstein is an American linguist and cognitive scientist. He was previously a professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics and a professor of psychology at Yale University, and is now a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California...

.

Representative Publications

• Studdert-Kennedy, M. & Liberman, A. M. (1962). Psychological considerations in design of auditory displays for reading machines. Proceedings of the International Congress on Technology and Blindness, 1, 289-304.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M. & Cooper, F. S. (1966). High-performance reading machines for the blind. International Conference on Sensory Devices for the Blind, 317-340.
• A. M. Liberman, F. S. Cooper, D. S. Shankweiler, and M. Studdert-Kennedy. Perception of the speech code. Psychological Review, 74, 1967, 431-461.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M., Liberman, A. M., Harris, K. S., & Cooper, F. S. (1970). Motor theory of speech perception: A reply to Lane's critical review. Psychological Review, 77, 234-249.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M., & Shankweiler, D. P. (1970). Hemispheric specialization for speech perception. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 48, 579-594.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M., Shankweiler, D., & Schulman, S. (1970). Opposed effects of a delayed channel on perception of dichotically and monotically presented CV syllables. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 48, 599-602.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M., Shankweiler, D., & Pisoni, D. (1972). Auditory and phonetic processes in speech perception: Evidence from a dichotic study. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2, 455-466.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M., & Hadding, K. (1973). Auditory and linguistic processes in the perception of intonation contours. Language and Speech, 16, 293-313.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1975). Two questions. Brain and Language, 2, 123-130.* * Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1976). Speech perception. In N. J. Lass (Ed.), Contemporary issues in experimental phonetics (pp. 243-293). New York: Academic Press.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1980). Speech perception. Language and Speech, 23, 45-66.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M., & Lane, H. (1980). Clues from the differences between signed and spoken language. In U. Bellugi & M. Studdert-Kennedy (Eds.), Signed and spoken language: Biological constraints on linguistic form (pp. 29-39). Deerfield Park, FL.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M., & Shankweiler, D. (1981). Hemispheric specialization for language processes. Science, 211, 960-961.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1993). Discovering phonetic function. Journal of Phonetics, 21, 147-155.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M. & Goodell, E.W. (1995). Gestures, features and segments in early child speech. In: deGelder, B. & Morais, J. (eds.). Speech and Reading: A Comparative Approach. Hove, England: Erlbaum (UK), Taylor & Francis.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1998). The particulate origins of language generativity: from syllable to gesture. In: Hurford, J., Studdert-Kennedy, M., & Knight, C. (eds.), Approaches to the evolution of language, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M. & Whalen, D.H. (1999). A brief history of speech perception research in the United States. In A. Bronstein, J.Ohala & W.Weigel (eds) A guide to the history of the phonetic sciences in the United States. University of California Press: Berkeley CA.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M., Mody, M. & Brady, S. (2000). Speech perception deficits in poor readers: A reply to Denenbergfs critique. Journal of Learning Disabilities, v.33, 4, 317-321.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M. (2000). Imitation and the emergence of segments. Phonetica, 57, 275-283.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M. (2000). Evolutionary implications of the particulate principle: imitation and the dissociation of phonetic form from semantic function. In: Knight, C., Studdert-Kennedy, M. & Hurford, J.R. (eds.). The Evolutionary Emergence of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M. & Goldstein, L. (2003). Launching language: The gestural origin of dicrete infinity. In Morten Christiansen and Simon Kirby (eds.).Language Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 235-254.
• Studdert-Kennedy, M. (2005). How did language go discrete? Language Origins: Perspectives on Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 48-67.