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Satsuki Nakai

	Research

Research Interests: relationship between speech production and speech perception (perceptual constancy versus acoustic variation in particular), speech timing, language acquisition, sound change, lexical access.

I am fascinated by two interrelated questions in speech perception: how perceptual constancy is achieved for speech sounds in the face of apparent lack of invariance in the acoustic signal, and how the listener correctly interprets different sources of information (e.g. phonemic, prosodic, sociolinguistic, articulation rate) simultaneously encoded in the speech signal. For the past several years, I have addressed the issue through the use of duration for phonemic and prosodic purposes in Finnish and Japanese. The study was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and the University of Edinburgh. Collaborators included Alice Turk, Kari Suomi, Riikka Ylitalo and Sari Kunnari. Papers are gradually coming out; see my publication page.

Mits Ota and I have recently finished a project entitled "Memory consolidation in second language acquisition", which investigated whether there is a memory component in "foreign accent". Evia Kainada helped us as a Greek consultant, and Shane Lindsay with programming the experiments. The project was funded by the British Academy.