Melissa Baese-Berk

Melissa Baese-Berk


Areas of Study: Department of Linguistics Teaching Since 2023 Website: http://www.melissabaeseberk.com/ Curriculum Vitae Interests:

Phonology, phonetics, psycholinguistics, speech perception, speech production, second language acquisition

Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the College
Biography

Dr. Melissa Baese-Berk studies the way we understand, produce, and learn spoken language, with an emphasis on second-language acquisition. She uses experimental and corpus-based methods to investigate how speakers and listeners produce and perceive language and how various cognitive, linguistic, and social factors impact these abilities. Some current projects examine communication between health-care providers and aging patients, the relationship between perception and production among learners of second languages, and a collaborative project examining what neural activity in mice during perception can tell us about how humans perceive speech. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the James S. McDonnell Foundation. 

Recent Research / Recent Publications
" Popular metrics find phantom convergence: A case for controls in laboratory shadowing ," June 2026.
Poster Presentation
" Adaptation to unfamiliar speech ." April 2026.
Presentation
" Understanding the relationship of speech perception and production during learning ." April 2026.
Presentation
" Medical communication in hospital noise ." March 2026.
Presentation
" The impact of hospital noise on comprehension and memory for medically related speech ," December 2025.
Poster Presentation
" Gamification: Virtual medical scenarios to explore the impact of hospital noise on comprehension and memory ." May 2025.
Presentation
" Individual differences in perceptual assimilation patterns across languages ." May 2025.
Presentation
" Is speech processing faster for familiar talkers ." May 2025.
Presentation
" The influence of physical context on speech perception ." May 2025.
Presentation
" Training type and composition moderate efficacy of perceptual learning for speech ." May 2025.
Presentation