Psycholinguistics is concerned with how people understand
(perceive and comprehend) spoken and written language, how
people produce language, and how languages are learned (and
lost). Phonetics is concerned with describing the speech sounds
that occur in human languages. Articulatory phonetics describes
how speakers produce speech sounds (speech production), speech
perception is concerned with how listeners process speech
sounds, and acoustic phonetics studies the physical properties
of the sound wave that travels from the speaker's mouth to the
listener's ear. I started to become actively involved in infant
speech perception research when Linda Polka
(http://www.mcgill.ca/scsd/faculty/polka/) asked me to
collaborate with her on cross-language infant vowel perception.
The focus of our research has been on My work in this area
started when I became JamesFlege's (http://jimflege.com/) first
post-doc (1987-1989). Part of our work on Flege's Speech
Learning Model involved cross-language studies, but the main
focu