Prof Valerie Hazan

Research summary

Recently, most of my research has been concerned with speaker/listener interaction in speech communication, i.e. how speakers adapt the characteristics of their speech production to achieve effective communication in good and poor listening conditions. In a series of three ESRC-funded projects, we have investigated the acoustic-phonetic characteristics of speaker-listener interactions in young adults, children with normal and impaired-hearing and older adults. The accent has been on ‘clear speech’ adaptations made in challenging communicative conditions.

I generally have an interest in issues of within- and between-speaker variability in speech perception and production and in the development of speech perception and production in typical and atypical populations.

I have also carried out research on speech perception in second-language learners, on the effectiveness of auditory-visual phonetic training and on audiovisual speech perception.

Collaborators

Profs Jeesun Kim and Chris Davis (University of Western Sydney, Australia)

Teaching summary

I teach course units on speech perception and hearing sciences, primarily to students taking the BSc degree in Psychology and Language Sciences and MSc in Language Sciences. These course units have an important laboratory component, as each hour lecture is followed by a practical session, which usually involves participating in a speech perception test and analysing the data, or doing some speech analysis.

Education

University of London

PhD, Experimental Phonetics | 1986

University of Reading

MA, Linguistics | 1980

University of Salford

BSc Hons, French and Italian | 1979

Publications