Lab Managers

Christi Gomez
Christi received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Penn State University in 1998. After receiving her degree, Christi returned to her hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. Christi joined us in February 2001 as our Laboratory Manager.


Anthony Kelly
Before coming to work in the Speech Perception and Learning Laboratory, Anthony taught English as second language in France for a number of years. He earned his B.A. in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University in 1986 and studied linguistics and translation (French - English) at Universite Paris IV.



Post-Doctoral Researchers

Kaori Idemaru
Kaori's research is aimed at understanding how people perceive durational contrasts and how contextual information affects the perception of duration. Currently, she is exploring several acoustic properties involved in the perception of Japanese singleton vs. geminate stop sounds, and she hopes to extend this research to SLA, developmental and cross-linguistic studies. Kaori earned her Ph.D. at the University of Oregon.











Graduate Students

Erin Ingvalson
Erin got her B.A. in Psychology from Notre Dame in 2002, where she worked with Michael Wenger. Her undergraduate research focused on competing theories of face perception and her senior thesis was a rigorous test of one of these hypotheses.

She is now working on second language acquisition and bilingualism. In particular, she is interested in how a person's first language interferes with the ability to learn the syntactic and phonetic components of the second language. A secondary interest is how these representations compete in language processing by a full bilingual.





Jingyuan (Sofia) Huang
Jingyuan is interested in the interaction between the perception of first and second languages. She also has interests in first and second language acquisition. Jingyuan got her BS in psychology from Beijing Normal University.









Sara Guediche
Sara Guediche is a member of Dr. Julie Fiez’s laboratory at University of Pittsburgh and a graduate student in the Center for Neuroscience University of Pittsburgh program. In her dissertation research, Sara is conducting investigations of the adaptive plasticity of speech perception which she will later extend to functional neuroimaging methods.








Sung-Joo Lim
Sung-joo has a B.S. in Computer Science from CMU. She is interested in studying auditory perception. She would specifically like to study the similarities between language and music and how music affects human emotion and memory.



Erika JCL Taylor
Erika is interested in the auditory cortical processing of speech perception, specifically the mechanisms underlying speech sound categorization. She's currently using electrophysiological methods (ERP and MEG) to examine these mechanisms, and plans to eventually incorporate functional neuroimaging methods as well. Erika got her B.S. in Cognitive Science from CMU in 2001.









Undergraduate Researchers

Ran Liu
Ran Liu, a senior Cognitive Science major, is conducting an honors thesis entitled “Effects of short-term experience on auditory categorization: An event-related potential study”. This project is supported by a Small Undergraduate Research Grant.









Megan Nisargand
Megan, a junior double major in Decision Science and Policy and Management, is excited to be working in the Speech Perception and Learning Lab. Her research in language development has expanded her interests in psychology and strengthened her communication and research skills. She especially enjoys conducting experiments and analyzing data.









Lab Alumni

Former Post-Doctoral Researchers

  • Dr. Travis Wade
    • Currently at Posit Science Corporation & Institut für Maschinelle Spachverarbeitung, Universität Stuttgart

Former Graduate Students


Former Undergraduate Researchers

  • Kathleen Agres (2002 - 2005)
  • Zeljka Buturovic Bradaric (2000 - 2002)
  • Siobhan Cooney (2000 - 2002)
  • Monica Data (2002 - 2002)
  • Nina Durai (2003 - 2004)
  • Ashley Episcopo (2002 - 2004)
  • Josh Fishbein (2005)
  • Brian Frederick (2000 - 2002)
  • Sara Guediche (2004 - 2004)
  • Sara Kapner (2003 - 2005)
  • Ayus Kennedy (2005 - 2006)
  • Camilla Kydland(2002 - 2003)
  • Erika Laing (2000 - 2002)
  • Chris Laskowski
  • Brian Leahy (2003 - 2004)
  • Brian Levinthal (2002 - 2003)
  • Seth Liber (2001 - 2003)
  • Brian Mathias (2004 - 2007)
  • Laura Mazurkewicz (2002 - 2004)
  • Neha Mehta (2005 - 2006)
  • Wendy Niedelman (2004 - 2007)
  • Eva Stroynowski (2002 - 2004)
  • Eric To (2001 - 2002)
  • Jodi Poniewaz (2001 - 2001)
  • Jeremy Wortman (2002 - 2003)
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