Professor Catherine Best

Chair in Psycholinguistic Research in the Speech and Language research program at the MARCS Institute

Biography

After receiving her PhD in Developmental Psychology and Neuroscience (Michigan State U, 1978), Best was awarded a prestigious NIH postdoctoral fellowship grant (1978-1980) to study psycholinguistics at the world-renowned Haskins Laboratories, where she was supervised by two central figures in speech perception research: Alvin Liberman and Michael Studdert-Kennedy.

From there, she served for 4 years as the Director of the Neuroscience & Education program at Columbia University (1980-1984), and then took up a faculty position in Psychology at Wesleyan University (1984-2004). She then joined MARCS Laboratories, University of Western Sydney (now MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University), as Chair in Psycholinguistic Research in late 2004.

Best's research and theoretical work has focused primarily on how adults' and infants' experience with their native language shapes their perception and production of the phonological elements of spoken words, including consonants, vowels, lexical tones and prosodic patterns. She has applied this theme broadly, investigating perception and production of spoken language in second language learners and bilinguals, in children with language difficulties, and expanding her research to include sign language, facial expressions, and culture-specific characteristics of music. Her most significant theoretical contribution is her model the effects of language experience on perception: the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM: e.g., Best, 1984, 1994a, 1994b, 1995).

Best's work has offered important insights into why many non-native phonetic contrasts are difficult for adults and older infants to discriminate, while others remain much easier. Throughout her work, Best has taken an ecological, or direct realist, philosophical perspective, founded on James Gibson's ecological theory of perception. During her Wesleyan years, she was awarded a highly competitive NIH Research Career Development Award, providing her with several years of advanced linguistics training, which deepened her interest in articulatory information as a viable basis for speech perception.

That interest has been fundamental to the development of the PAM model, and provides the core motivation for her more recent line of research on the effects of regional accent differences in spoken word recognition by infants, toddlers and adults.

Research Interests

  • Listening with a Native Ear: Cross-Language Speech Perception and Word Recognition
  • How Strict is the Mother Tongue? Effects of Regional Accent Differences on Perception of Phonetic Segments and Spoken Words
  • Development of Phonology and Spoken Word Recognition in Children with Atypical Language
  • Perception of Articulatory Information in Speech
  • Articulatory Phonology: How Speakers Produce the Coordinated Articulatory Gestures that Shape the Perceived Speech Signal

Qualifications and Recognition

  • BS, Michigan State University
  • MA, Michigan State University
  • PhD, Michigan State University

Research and Publications

https://research-report.uws.edu.au/wpubs/Portal.asp

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C.Best@westernsydney.edu.au