Suzanne Curtin Assistant Professor of Linguistics Address: Department of Linguistics & Psychology                2806 Cathedral of Learning                University of Pittsburgh                Pittsburgh, PA 15260 Telephone: (412) 624-5933  E-mail: scurtin@pitt.edu

CURRENTLY:    AS OF JULY 2005, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENTS OF LINGUISTICS AND PSYCHOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
                            IN CALGARY, ALBERTA CANADA.
                            VISIT MY NEW WEBPAGE
                            VISIT OUR NEW SPEECH DEVELOPMENT LAB WEBITE

PREVIOUSLY:

Assistant Professor in Linguistics and Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.
Director of the Speech Development Lab which is part of the Infant Toddler Center.
 

Previous Affiliations:

Post-doctoral Fellow in Psychology at the University of British Columbia in Janet Werker's Infant Studies Centre.

Ph.D. in Linguisticsat the University of Southern California 2002.

MA in Linguistics USC 1998.

BA in Linguistics McGill University 1996.

I have also worked as a consultant for Neurosmith, a creative toy company which produces toys for early cognitive development, combining traditional 'play' objects with the intelligence of educational software.

Research Interests:

My main research areas are 1) infant speech perception, segmentation, and lexical representations; and 2) phonological acquisition (perception and production). I am interested in what properties of the speech stream infants are sensitive to and whether these sensitivies change over time. I am also exploring the content of early representations and how these are shaped by experience with the language around them. The potential richness of children's lexical representations can be determined by examining both the perceptual abilities of infants and children's early production patterns. Recently, Janet Werker and I have developed a model, PRIMIR, which provides a basis for exploring infant speech perception and word learning.

Current Projects:

• Lexical stress in word segmentation, representations, and word learning.
• Coarticulatory cues in sequential recognition.
• Gender identification of children's voices (with Scott Kiesling). Click here to view our preliminary results.
• Dialect acquisiton (with Scott Kiesling)
• Cooccurence restrictions on liquids.
• Acquisition of liquids -- WoRLD.
• Child-directed vs. Adult-directed speech in lexical ambiguity.
• PRIMIR - a theoretical model of developmental speech processing with Janet Werker.

 

 

• Introduction to Linguistics (Ling 1950/ Psych 1050) Fall 2002.
• Phonetics and Phonemics (Ling 1578/2578) Fall 2002.
• Phonology (Ling 1579/2579) Spring 2003, 2004.
• Psycholinguistics (Ling 2945) Spring 2003, 2004.
• Language and the Mind (Ling/Psych 1580) Fall 2003, 2004
• Phonetics and Phonemics (Ling 2578) Fall 2003
• Advanced Phonology (Ling 3579) Fall 2004

 Last Updated 22 July, 2003