Last Updated February 3, 2010


Canterbury, New Zealand, AKA Heaven on Earth
Benjamin Munson is my name, being a professor is my game
Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences
University of Minnesota
115 Shevlin Hall
164 Pillsbury Drive, SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA
Vox: +1 612 624 3322
Fax: +1 612 624 7586

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My Blog (external link. Caution: contains bluntly worded text expressing opinions on a variety of topics. It may shock, inform, and amuse you!)
My Vita (updated more frequently than the vita on the university website. Those who care deeply about the names of my advisees will want to consult this link)
Research: Phonological Development and Disorders
Research: Sociophonetics (including my work on sexual orientation)
Research: Laboratory Phonology Potpourri (the influence of lexical factors on vowel production, assessment of cleft palate speech, cochlear implants, etc.)
Teaching
Collaboration
My Education
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Research

My research has two broad themes. The first of these is phonological development and disorders. My research tries to address a variety of questions. How do children acquire the sound structure of their native language? What do children (and, for that matter, adults) know about the sound structure of their language? What are the limits of individual differences in this knowledge? What cognitive, linguistic, social, perceptual, and motor skills support speech-sound learning? What causes some children to have severe difficulties acquiring the sound structure of their native language in the absence of any clear predisposing factors? What are the social and educational consequences of variation in and disorders of knowledge the sound structure of language?

The Model

Figure: M. Beckman, J. Edwards

My early work on this topic examined relationships between word learning and speech-sound knowledge (Munson, 2001 JSLHR, Edwards et al., 2004, Munson, Edwards, & Beckman, 2005; Munson, Swenson, & Manthei, 2005; Munson, Kurtz, & Windsor, 2005). This was followed by a set of studies using psycholinguistic methods to examine further the levels of impairment implicated in childhood speech-sound disorder. These are summarized in Munson, Baylis, Krause, and Yim (in press), and in various presentations in 2006. One important lasting lesson from that project is that there is a supremely complex relationship between speech-production abilities and response times in naming task. The ultimate publication of the results of the experiments from that project (indeed, the most lasting contribution from that project) is dependent on my learning and adapting complex statistical models to tease apart the roles of speech-production accuracy and higher-level linguistic formulation on responses times in naming tasks. This endeavor is ongoing, and has been spurred by the recent gain in popularity in the field of linguistics of linear mixed-effects models. Stay tuned for more work on that. This work is also the foundation for a series of planned large-scale projects on phonological disorder. (See collaborations for more on that.)

My more recent work, done as part of the paidologosproject [link], has focused on detailed studies how children learn the relationship between speech articulation its acoustic consequences.  This work has been funded by a grant from the Human and Social Dynamics initiative of the National Science Foundation, and has four principal investigators: Mary Beckman, Jan Edwards, Eric Fosler-Lussier (Dept. of Computer Science, Ohio State University), and me.  My part in this project has been to conduct cross-linguistic studies of adults' perception of children's productions, taken from the database of cross-linguistic phonological acquisition that Beckman and Edwards developed in their own research.  One major finding from that study is that adult speakers' interpretations of children's emerging productions are highly language specific.  Munson, Li, et al. (2008 Linguistic Society Annual Meeting, see also Li, Munson, et al., in preparation) found that Japanese- and English-speaking adults interpret children's sibilant fricative productions differently: English adults interpret ambiguous productions as /s/, while Japanese adults interpret them as a post-alveolar fricative.  This finding explains in part the well-established cross-language asymmetries in the order of acquisition of /s/ and its post-alveolar counterpart.  Work in progress (in collaboration with Edwards and Tim Arbisi-Kelm) shows a similar asymmetry for the perception of alveolar and velar stops by English- and Greek-speaking adults.  Again, this explains another cross-language order-of-acquisition asymmetry.  Another major finding from this study is that adults are able to perceive fine phonetic detail in children's speech extremely accurately when given a response modality that allows for a continuous response, such as visual analog scaling.  This is true for a variety of contrasts, and is stable across differences in task difficulty (Urberg-Carlson, Kaiser, & Munson, 2008; Urberg-Carlson, Munson, & Kaiser, 2009; Kaiser, Munson, et al., 2009).  This finding has practical importance, in that it shows that people can conduct relatively fine-grained assessments of children's speech without necessarily using complex instrumentation.  It also has theoretical importance, in that it shows that we should use gradient feedback in the computational learning models that we are developing in the broader grant project. 

Representative Publications in this area (reverse chronological order, some with links):

Yoneyama, K., & Munson, B. (submitted). The Influence of Lexical Factors on Word Recognition by Native English Speakers and Japanese Speakers Acquiring English: A First Report. Under consideration in a special issue of Journal of Phonetic Society of Japan entitled "Advances in Experimental Optimality Theory and Laboratory Phonology."
Munson, B., Edwards, J., Schellinger, S.K., Beckman, M.E., & Meyer, M.K. (in press). Deconstructing Phonetic Transcription: Covert Contrast, Perceptual Bias, and an Extraterrestrial View of Vox Humana. To be published in a special issue of Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics in honor of Adele Miccio.
Munson, B., Edwards, J., & Beckman, M.E. (in press). Phonological representations in language acquisition:  Climbing the ladder of abstraction.  To appear in Handbook of Laboratory Phonology (A.C. Cohn, C. Fougeron, & M. K. Huffman, Eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Note: revised version uploaded, February 1, 2010]
Munson, B., Baylis, A.L., Krause, M.O., & Yim, D.-S. (in press). Representation and Access in Phonological Impairment. Papers in Laboratory Phonology 10.
Edwards, J., & Munson, B. (2008).  Bases: perception, production, and phonology.  In R. Schwartz (Ed.), Handbook of Child Language Disorders.  New York: Psychology Press.
Beckman, M.E., Munson, B., & Edwards, J. (2007). The influence of vocabulary growth on developmental changes in types of phonological knowledge. In J. Cole & J. Hualde (Eds.), Laboratory Phonology 9 (p. 241-264). New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Munson, B. (2006). Nonword repetition and levels of abstraction in phonological knowledge. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 577-581.
Munson, B., Edwards, J., & Beckman, M.E. (2005). Phonological knowledge in typical and atypical speech-sound development. Topics in Language Disorders, 25, 190-206.
Munson, B., Kurtz, B.A., & Windsor, J. (2005). The Influence of Vocabulary Size, Phonotactic Probability, and Wordlikeness on Nonword Repetitions of Children with and without Language Impairments. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48, 1033-1047.
Munson, B., Swenson, C.L., & Manthei, S.C. (2005). Lexical and phonological organization in children: evidence from repetition tasks. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48, 108-123.
Munson, B., & Babel, M.E. (2005).  The sequential cueing effect in children's speech production.  Applied Psycholinguistics, 26, 157-174. 
Munson, B., Edwards, J., & Beckman, M.E. (2005). Relationships between nonword repetition accuracy and other measures of linguistic development in children with phonological disorders. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48, 61-78.
Munson, B., & Brinkman, K.N. (2004). The effect of multiple presentations on judgments of children's speech production accuracy. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 13, 341-354.
Edwards, J., Beckman, M.E., & Munson, B. (2004). The interaction between vocabulary size and phonotactic probability effects on children’s production accuracy and fluency in nonword repetition. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47, 421-436.
Munson, B. (2004). Variability in /s/ production in children and adults: evidence from dynamic measures of spectral mean. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47, 58-69.
Munson, B., Bjorum, E., & Windsor, J. (2003). Acoustic and perceptual correlates of stress in nonwords produced by children with suspected developmental apraxia of speech and children with phonological disorder. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 46, 189-202.
Munson, B. (2001). Phonological pattern frequency and speech production in children and adults. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44, 778-792.
Munson, B. (2001). Relationships between vocabulary size and spoken word recognition in children aged 3-7. Contemporary Issues in Communication Disorders and Sciences, 28, 20-29.
Manis, F. R., McBride-Chang, C., Seidenberg, M. S., Keating, P., Doi, L. M., Munson, B., & Peterson, A. (1997).  Are speech perception deficits associated with developmental dyslexia?  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 66, 211-235.

Selected Recent Conference Presentations (2006-, some with links) (Presentations that are more-or-less redundant with published articles from the above list are not listed)

Yoneyama, K., & Munson, B. (2010). Lexical and phonetic influences on Japanese listeners' perception of spoken English words. Poster presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Baltimore, MD, January 8.
Edwards, J., & Munson, B. (2009). Clinical Transcription: Old Concerns, New Solutions. Oral presentation (as part of the panel Clinical Tools for Representing Speech Productions: Transcription and Beyond [T. Brackenbury, Organizer]) at the Annual Meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, New Orleans, LA, November 19-21.
Syrika, A., Li, F., Edwards, J., Beckman, M.E., & Munson, B. (2009). Transitional cues in fricative noise in Greek /s/-stop and stop-/s/ sequences: Children versus adults. Poster presented at the fall 2009 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Also in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126, 2128.
Syrika, A., Li, F., Kong, E-J., Edwards, J., Beckman, M.E., & Munson, B. (2009). Coarticulation of /s/ with following or preceding stops in Greek consonant sequences. Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Greek Linguistics, University of Chicago, 29-31 October 2009.
Yoneyama, K., & Munson, B. (2009). Spoken Word Recognition in First and Second Languages: The case of Japanese Listeners. Oral presentation at the International Phonetics and Phonology Forum, Kobe University, Japan, August 26, 2009.
Schellinger, S., Meyer, M., Munson, B., Edwards, J., & Beckman, M. (2009). The Role of Listener Expectations on Judgments of Children's /s/ Productions, Revisited. Poster presented at the 2009 Symposium for Research on Child Language Disorders, Madison, WI, June 5, 2009.
Urberg-Carlson, K., Munson, B., & Kaiser, E. (2009). Gradient measures of children's speech production: Visual analog scale and equal appearing interval scale measures of fricative goodness. Poster presented at the spring 2009 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Also in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125, 2529.
Kaiser, E., Munson, B., Li, F., Holliday, J., Beckman, M., Edwards, J., & Schellinger, S. (2009). Why do adults vary in how categorically they rate the accuracy of children's speech? Poster presented at the spring 2009 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Also in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125, 2753.
Brackenberry, T., Williams, A.L., Munson, B., Lof, G., & Fey, M. (2008). Practice in Child Phonological Disorders: Tackling Some Common Clinical Problems. Panel presentation at the 2008 ASHA Convention, Chicago, 20-22.
Schellinger, S., Edwards, J., Munson, B., & Beckman, M. E. (2008). Assessment of children's speech production 1: Transcription categories and listener expectations. Poster presented at the 2008 ASHA Convention, November 20-22.
Urberg Carlson, K., Kaiser, E., & Munson, B. (2008). Assessment of children's speech production 2: Testing gradient measures of children's productions. Poster presented at the 2008 ASHA Convention, Chicago, 20-22.
Munson, B., Kaiser, E., & Urberg Carlson, K. (2008). Assessment of children's speech production 3: Fidelity of responses under different levels of task delay. Poster presented at the 2008 ASHA Convention, Chicago, 20-22.
Schellinger, S. K., Edwards, J., Munson, B., & Beckman, M. E. (2008). The role of listener expectations on judgments of children's /s/ productions. Poster presented at the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders, 5-7 June, University of Wisconsin -- Madison.
Schellinger, S., Edwards, J., Munson, B., & Beckman, M. E. (2008) Does "close" count in transcription as well as in horseshoes? Poster presented at the Child Phonology Conference, 2-3, Purdue University.
Munson, B., Li, F. [PRESENTING AUTHOR], Yoneyama, K., Hall, K., Beckman, M., Edwards, J., & Sunawatari, Y. (2008). Sibilant Fricatives in English and Japanese: Different in Production or in Perception? Oral presentation given at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago, IL.
Stoeckel, R., & Munson, B. (2007). The Development of Phonological Knowledge in Children. Poster presentation given at the annual meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Boston, MA.
Munson, B., & Baylis, A. (2007). Predicting Phonetic Variation in Children Aged 3 to 7 Years. Poster presentation given at the annual meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Boston, MA.
Munson, B. (2007). Splitting Saussure's «Signifié». Oral presentation given at the annual meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Boston, MA, as part of the panel discussion Word Learning in Situ (K. McGregor, coordinator).
Munson, B., Baylis, A., Blasing, K., Brincks, S., Krause, M., Simmons, D., & Yim, D.-S. (2006). Exploring the Etiology of Phonological Impairment in Children. Oral Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Miami, FL.
Munson, B., Brincks, S.J., Yim, D.-S., & White, A.R. (2006). Lexical Access in Phonological Impairment: Evidence from a Delayed Naming Task. Poster presentation at the annual Symposium for Research on Child Language Disorders, Madison, WI.
Munson, B., Baylis, A.L., & Simmons, D. (2006). Perceptual Learning in Phonological Impairment: Evidence from a Long-Term Repetition Priming Experiment. Poster presentation at the annual Symposium for Research on Child Language Disorders, Madison, WI.
Krause, M.O., Munson, B., & Blasing, K.M. (2006). Phonological Encoding in Phonological Impairment: Evidence from a Cross-Modal Picture-Word Interference Experiment. Poster presentation at the annual Symposium for Research on Child Language Disorders, Madison, WI.
Baylis, A., & Munson, B. (2006). Demographic factors associated with phonological impairment in children. Poster presentation at the biannual meeting of the Minnesota Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Brainerd, MN

My second area is sociophonetics. Variability is the hallmark of speech and language as it exists in the real world. This variability occurs at every level of linguistic structure, from the resonant frequencies in the nucleus of a vowel, to the form of the copula, to the choice of particular words in discourse. Most of this variability is not random, but reflects attributes about speakers and the messages they intend to convey. Part of the task of learning language is learning the states, attributes, and functions that different linguistic forms index. This knowledge serves two functions. First, it allows children to interpret and convey an additional set of messages in the speech signal. Second, it potentially helps the child 'normalize' variable forms when learning and processing regular semantic meaning.

This is a critical, and sadly all-too-often ignored, facet of language acquisition. Our work in this area ultimately hopes to build models of the interplay between indexical learning and 'regular' language learning (i.e., learning sounds, words, morphophonological alternations--the whole megillah) across languages and across different ability levels. That is, we are interested in whether language impairments, phonological disorders, and psychosocial impairments [like autism] are associated with a decreased ability to interpret variable linguistic forms as indicators of social meaning. We are also interested in how talkers convey attributes, social categories, and stances through phonetic variation, and how listeners perceive these.

This is exciting work. It has required me to read outside of the usual journals that I read and go to new conferences. I have had to re-train myself in areas I never thought I would study: personality psychology, metacognition, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies, just to name a few. Bridging different disciplines is exciting and has helped me see language in an entirely new light.

Students who are interested in issues related to linguistic and cultural diversity as they impact the professions of speech-language pathology and audiology are encouraged to read up on our department's Bi-MEP (Bilingual and Multicultural Emphasis Program), directed by Dr. Kathi Kohnert.

Representative publications (reverse chronological order, some with links):

Munson, B., & Coyne, A.J. (submitted). The Influence of Apparent Vocal-Tract Size, Contrast Type, and Implied Sources of Variation on the Perception of American English Voiceless Lingual Fricatives. Special issue of the Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan entitled "Advances in Experimental Optimality Theory and Laboratory Phonology."
Mack, S., & Munson, B. (submitted). The Influence of /s/ Quality on Perception of Men's Sexual Orientation: Explicit and Implicit Measures of the 'Gay Lisp' Stereotype. Manuscript under consideration.
Smith, E.A., Hall, K.C., & Munson, B. (in press). Bringing semantics to sociophonetics: social variables and secondary entailments. Laboratory Phonology 11.
Munson, B. (in press). Levels of phonological abstraction and knowledge of socially motivated speech-sound variation: a review, a proposal, and a commentary on the Papers by Clopper, Pierrehumbert, and Tamati; Drager; Foulkes; Mack; and Smith, Hall, and Munson. Laboratory Phonology 11. [final form uploaded 12/15/2009]
Munson, B. (2010). Variation, implied pathology, social meaning, and the 'gay lisp': a response to Van Borsel et al. (2009). Journal of Communication Disorders, 43, 1–5.
Munson, B. (2009).  Pathology or social indexing?  In C. Bowen, Children's Speech Sound Disorders. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, p. 342-346.
Munson, B. (2007).  [Review of M. Ball (Ed.), Clinical Sociolinguistics].  Journal of the International Phonetics Association, 37, 235-238. 
Munson, B. (2007). Lexical characteristics mediate the influence of talker sex and sex typicality on vowel-space size. In J. Trouvain & W. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Congress on Phonetic Sciences (p. 885-888). Saarbrucken, Germany: University of Saarland.

Munson, B., & Babel, M. (2007). Loose lips and silver tongues: projecting sexual orientation through speech. Linguistics and Language Compass 1, 416-449.
Munson, B. (2007). The acoustic correlates of perceived sexual orientation, perceived masculinity, and perceived femininity. Language and Speech, 50, 125-142.
Munson, B., McDonald, E.C., DeBoe, N.L., & White, A.R. (2006). Acoustic and perceptual bases of judgments of women and men's sexual orientation from read speech. Journal of Phonetics, 34, 202-240.
Munson, B., Jefferson, S.V., & McDonald, E.C. (2006). The influence of perceived sexual orientation on fricative identification. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119, 2427-2437.
Pierrehumbert, J.B., Bent, T., Munson, B., Bradlow, A.R., & Bailey, J.M. (2004). The influence of sexual orientation on vowel production. Journalof the Acoustical Society of America, 116, 1905-1908.

Recent Conference Presentations (2006-, some with links) (Presentations that are more-or-less redundant with published articles from the above list are not listed)

Munson, B. (2010). The sociophonetics of sexuality: Insights from laboratory phonology and experimental semantics, or, Three Lavender Lessons Learned. Oral presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (as part of the panel Issues in the study of sociolinguistic variation and sexuality, organized by R. Podesva and P. Eckert), Baltimore, MD, January 9
Kemper, S.W., & Munson, B. (2010). Implicit Perception of Speaker Sex Affects Fricative Categorization. Oral presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Baltimore, MD, January 7.
Munson, B. (2009). The Influence of /s/ Quality on Judgments of the Sex Typicality of Boys' Speech. Oral presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, New Orleans, LA, November 19-21.
Munson, B., & Seppanen, V. (2009). Perceived Gender Affects Ratings of the Quality of Children's Spoken Narratives. Oral prsentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, New Orleans, LA, November 19-21.
Munson, B. (2009). On Voiceless Fricative Perception: Vocal-Tract Normalization and Socioindexicality. Oral presentation at the International Phonetics and Phonology Forum, Kobe University, Japan, August 26, 2009.
Munson, B., Ferguson, S.H., & Connealy, C. (2009). Perceived sexual orientation and speech style: A perceptual and acoustic analysis of intentionally clear and conversational speech. Poster presented at the spring 2009 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Also in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125, 2574.
Munson, B., Hall, K., & Smith, E. (2009). An acoustic analysis of /æ/ variation and its relationship to perceived sexual orientation in American English. Poster presented at the spring 2009 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Also in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125, 2574.

Please also see the lay-language summary of this paper by clicking this link.

Graff, P. & Munson, B. (2009). Studying the culture-phonology interface. Oral presentation at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Francisco, CA.
Munson, B. (2009). Gender biases in fricative identification revisited. Oral presentation at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Francisco, CA.
Munson, B. & Kaiser, E. (2009). Sociophonetic variation and the 'ladder of abstraction' in phonology. Oral presentation at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Francisco, CA.
Urberg-Carlson, K., & Munson, B. (2008). Gender Typicality in Children's Speech 1: Breathiness and Perceived Sex Typicality. Poster presented at the 2008 ASHA Convention, Chicago, 20-22.
Munson, B., Bauer, H., & Zittnan, A. (2008). Gender Typicality in Children's Speech 2: Acoustic, Structural, and Perceptual Correlates of Gender Typicality in Children's Oral Narratives. Poster presented at the 2008 ASHA Convention, Chicago, 20-22.
Smith, E.A., Munson, B., & Hall, K.C. (2008). Rethinking the meaning of Minnesotan [æ]: sexual orientation or personal well being? Oral presentation at the conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), Houston, TX.
Munson, B., Li, F., & Yoneyama, K. (2008).The Influence of Gender Typicality on Sibilant Fricative Perception in English and Japanese. Oral presentation at the Mid-Continental Workshop in Phonology, Minneapolis, MN.
Kaiser, E., & Munson, B. (2008). Social selectivity in adults' novel-sound learning. Poster presentation given at the Eleventh Meeting on Laboratory Phonology, Wellington, New Zealand.
Munson, B. (2008). Is «sociophonetic» knowledge special? Invited commentary given at the Eleventh Meeting on Laboratory Phonology, Wellington, New Zealand.
Smith, E.A., Hall, K.C., & Munson, B. (2008). Bringing semantics to sociophonetics: social variables and secondary entailments. Oral presentation given at the Eleventh Meeting on Laboratory Phonology, Wellington, New Zealand.
Munson, B. (2008). The Development of Gendered Speech in Children Aged 3 to 13 Years. Invited presentation given at the Ohio State University symposium on linguistic variation across the lifespan, Columbus, Ohio.
Mack, S., & Munson, B. (2008).Implicit Processing, Social Stereotypes, and the 'Gay Lisp'.Oral presentation given at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago, IL.
Kemper, S., & Munson, B. (2007). A Tongue-Twisting Exploration of Sexual Orientation and Speech. Poster presented at the University of Minnesota Cognitive Science REU Symposium, August.
Munson, B., & Baylis, A. (2007). Gender Typicality in the Speech of Children with Phonological Disorder. Poster Presentation at the Symposium for Research on Child Language Disorders, Madison, WI.
Munson, B., & Zimmerman, L.J. (2006b).Perceptual Bias and the Myth of the 'Gay Lisp'. Poster Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Miami, FL.
Munson, B., & Zimmerman, L.J. (2006a). The Perception of Sexual Orientation, Masculinity, and Femininity in Formant-Resynthesized Speech. Oral Presentation given at the Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation in Language, Columbus, OH.
Crocker, L., & Munson, B. (2006).Speech Characteristics of Gender-Nonconforming Boys. Oral Presentation given at the Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation in Language, Columbus, OH.

In addition to my programmatic research, I have many other smaller projects on a potpourri of topics in laboratory phonology. These include work on speech production in adults, speech perception in individuals with cochlear implants, cleft palate, and other interesting topics. Dabbling in different research areas is one of the reasons why being a professor is so much fun. Perhaps the most enjoyable part of working outside of my primary areas of expertise is that I get to work with and learn from my colleagues. I have particularly enjoyed the work in this section on the influence of lexical factors on speech production (Munson, 2007; Munson & Solomon, 2004; Watson & Munson, 2007, 2008). In an ideal world, I would give this line of research equal billing and equal time with my work on acquisition and sociophonetics.

Representative Publications (reverse chronological order, some with links):

Baylis, A., Munson, B., & Moller, K. (submitted). Perceptions of Audible Nasal Emission in Speakers with Cleft Palate: A Comparative Study of Listener Judgments. Manuscript under consideration.

Watson, P., & Munson, B. (2008). Parkinson's disease and the effect of lexical factors on vowel articulation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 5, EL291-EL295.
Baylis, A.L., Munson, B., & Moller, K. (2008).  Factors affecting phonetic accuracy in children with velocardiofacial syndrome and children with cleft palate or velopharyngeal dysfunction: A preliminary report.  Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal, 45, 193–207.
Watson, P., & Munson, B. (2007).  The Influence of Phonological Neighborhood Density and Word Frequency on Vowel-Space Dispersion in Older and Younger Adults.  In J. Trouvain & W. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Congress on Phonetic Sciences (p. 561-564).  Saarbrucken, Germany: University of Saarland. 
Munson, B. (2007).  Lexical access, lexical representation, and vowel articulation.  In J. Cole & J. Hualde (Eds.), Laboratory Phonology 9 (p. 201-228)  New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 
Munson, B., & Watson, P.J. (2006).  [Review of W.J. Hardcastle & J. Mackenzie Beck (Eds.), A Figure of Speech: A Festschrift for John Laver].  Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 20, 717-719. 
Alamsaputra, D.M., Kohnert, K.J., Munson, B., & Reichle, J. (2006).  Synthesized speech intelligibility among non-native speakers of English.  Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 22, 258-268. 
Munson, B., & Nelson, P.B. (2005).  Phonetic identification in quiet and in noise by listeners with cochlear implants.  Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 118.
Munson, B., & Solomon, N.P. (2004).  The effect of phonological neighborhood density on vowel articulation.  Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47, 1048-1058.
Collison, E.A., Munson, B., & Carney, A.E. (2004).  Relations among linguistic and cognitive skill and spoken word recognition in adults with cochlear implants.  Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47, 496-508. 
Solomon, N.P., & Munson, B. (2004).  The effect of jaw position on measures of tongue strength and endurance.  Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47, 584-594. 
Munson, B., Donaldson, G., Allen, S., Collison, E., & Nelson, D. (2003).  Patterns of phoneme misperceptions by individual with cochlear implants.  Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 113, 925-935.  


Lahey, M., Edwards, J., & Munson, B. (2001).  Is speed of processing related to severity of language impairment?  Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 44, 1354-1362. 
Munson, B. (2001).  A method for studying variability in fricatives using dynamic measures of spectral mean.  Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 110, 1203-1206. 

Recent Conference Presentations (2006-, some with links) (Presentations that are more-or-less redundant with published articles from the above list are not listed)

Meyer, M.L., Munson, B., Benoit, K., Thurmes, A., Cordero, K.N., & Baylis, A. (2009). Expectation and Bias in the Assessment of Speech Naturalness. Oral presentation at the 2009 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention, New Orleans, LA, November, 19-21.
Benoit, K., Munson, B., Thurmes, A., Cordero, K.N., Baylis, A., & Moller, K. (2009).  Factors Affecting Speech Naturalness in Young Adults with a History of Cleft Palate.  Oral presentation at the American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association Meeting, Scottsdale, Arizona, April 24, 2009. 
Baylis, A., Moller, K., & Munson, B. (2009). Does Audible Nasal Emission Affect Listener Judgments of Hypernasality?  Oral presentation at the American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association Meeting, Scottsdale, Arizona, April 22, 2009. 
Benoit, K., Munson, B., Thurmes, A., Cordero, K.N., Baylis, A., & Moller, K. (2008).  Factors Affecting Speech Naturalness in Young Adults with a History of Cleft Palate.  Poster presented at the 2008 ASHA Convention, Chicago, IL, November 20-22.
Baylis, A.L., Munson, B., Moller, K.T. (2007).Perceptions of nasal air emission in speakers with cleft palate: a comparative study of rating techniques. Poster presentation given at the annual meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Boston, MA.
Padgitt, N.R., Carney, E.J., & Munson, B. (2006).  A Novel Computer-Based Speech-Perception Training Tool to Enhance Phonetics Instruction.  Oral Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Miami, FL.

Teaching

I typically teach three courses: Phonetics, Speech Science (that's roughly equivalent to laboratory phonology or experimental phonetics), and Phonological Disorders. I have occasionally taught a fourth course (Atypical Speech and Language or a freshmen seminar). Oddly, I'm in my 18th semester at the University of Minnesota and I have never taught a graduate seminar! Needless to say, I have the opportunity to do numerous one-on-one reading groups with doctoral students. I love classroom teaching. It's like improvisational theater.

In the teaching narrative that I wrote in fall 2005 for my tenure case, I wrote the following. At the time I thought it was painfully corny, but every time I look back at it I like it a little bit more.

"My teaching experiences in the past five years have been diverse, including classroom teaching, independent studies, and research mentoring of students at all levels.  All of my teaching reflects my philosophy of science, which has been strongly influenced by the work of David Hull (e.g., Science as a Process, University of Chicago Press [1988]).  Hull proposes that science is a Darwinian process—a cooperative, social activity that advances human knowledge to better adapt humans to the world in which we live.  Hull's work emphasizes the role of diverse communities working cooperatively to advance knowledge.  This cooperative work cannot occur if students are presented with a narrow vision of scholarship that encompasses only the field reflected in a course's designator.  In my classroom teaching, I ensure that students are exposed to viewpoints and methodologies from different disciplines.  In my research mentorship, I emphasize that students consider the broader context of their research.  The projects that I have mentored are characterized by an integration of intellectual traditions from disparate fields.  I hope that this helps to shape a generation of scholars who think integratively and work cooperatively with colleagues in a variety of disciplines, as this will advance our knowledge far more effectively than a generation who works in isolation."


I am very excited to be co-authoring a textbook with Ray Kent and Larry Shriberg. We will publish the Fifth edition of Clinical Phonetics in 2010, with the authors listed as Kent, Munson, and Shriberg. It is an honor and a pleasure to work with Ray and Larry. It's particularly gratifying to write the chapter on the clinical implications of sociophonetic variation.

Teaching also means one-on-one research mentoring. I have advised or co-asvised 11 undergraduate magna or summa cum laude theses, five MA theses (with an additional five in progress), and three Ph.D. dissertations.

Collaboration

Like so many scholars these days, my research crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. (Indeed, the phrase "my research crosses traditioanl disciplinary boundaries" probably shows up in 90% of the tenure research narratives that people have written this year and last!) It integrates theory and practice from speech-language-hearing sciences, speech-language pathology, linguistics, and psychology, among other disciplines. Collaboration is as rewarding as it is difficult. Traditional practice in the sciences is to build a fifedom, to work in isolation, and to defend the fifedom against outside marauders. Collaboration can require a person to check his/her credentialist ambitions at the door

I am fortunate to work with a number of people on these ongoing projects. I work very closely with Jan Edwards and Mary Beckman. I have collaborated with them since I started my doctoral program (Edwards was my PhD mentor, and Beckman was a de facto second-in-command) and probably will continue to work with them right up until one of us retires. We currently collaborate together on a variety of -related projects. We currently have an NSF grant along with Eric Fosler-Lussier to study computational models of articulatory-acoustic learning across languages. My section (grant BCS 0729277) funds, among other things, about 15 hours a week of speech perception testing examining adults' perception of the accuracy of children's speech production. If you are interested in participating in studies, just let me know! We are also continuing to work on other topics related to phonological disorders. This builds on Jan and Mary's earlier NIH grants, as well as my grant NIH-funded project Speech Production in Phonological Impairment (NIH grant R03 DC005702, 6/1/2003-5/31/2006, no-cost extension granted until 5/31/2007). We are currently planning a new set of studies examining relationships among category learning, phonological disorders, and word learning. I am also very excited to have a potential project in the wings with Susan Rvachew. I'm honored to be an affiliate member of the Delta Center at the University of Iowa.

My second large-ish collaborative project is with E. Allyn Smith and Kathleen Currie Hall, on the nature of socioindexical meaning. This project has been a wonderful opportunity for me to learn about formal semantics and pragmatics. Kathleen and Elizabeth are excellent collaborators. Our experiments (of which there are many, both completed and ongoing) have forced me to revise a broad claim I made in Munson, McDonald et al. (2006) about the social meaning of different [æ] variants in Minnesota, and to think in greater detail about the phonetic parameterization of these variants.

And the list goes on. Molly Babel was my first (but not my last) star undergraduate, and continues to be a close collaborator. Peter Graff and I have fun with sociophonetics. Peter Watson always has an idea up his sleeve. Joe Reichle keeps me thinking about speech intelligibility in the real world, particularly as it relates to augmentative and alternative communication devices.

My Education

I had the great fortune of going to a grammar school called the Coalition for Action, Unity, and Social Equality (CAUSE) school, a magnet school with a strong focus on social justice and experimental education. I went there from kindergarten through the end of grade school. I then went to high school at Mt. St. Joseph's Academy, a Catholic school also in Buffalo. After three very enjoyable years at Mount ('84-'87), it closed down.. I then spent a year at the City Honors School, a very nice school (consistently rated very highly by Newsweek) where most of my grade-school friends had gone. After one interesting year at Tufts University, I dropped out of college for a semester and ended up eventually at the State University of New York at Buffalo. I got a B.A. with a triple major in Political Science, Russian, and Linguistics in '92. I had a spectacular two and a half years as a graduate student in linguistics at UCLA, which ended when I dropped out of graduate school in early '95. After a few months working as a parking lot attendant at the Buffalo Zoo, I went on to Ohio State, where I got my M.A. in speech-language pathology in December '97 and my Ph.D. in Speech and Hearing Science in '00. I started my position as an Assistant Professor at Minnesota three days before I formally received my Ph.D. I feel very fortunate to have had some incredibly dedicated teachers at each of the schools I went to. I'm also very proud that my sister Nancy continues to teach in the same school district that educated us.

My Family

For four and half happy years Kevin Burk and I have been together! Kevin has recently been called "everyone's favorite non-linguist" (credit: Abby Walker), and frequently attends conferences with me so that he can hang out in Chicago, Wellington, San Francisco, etc. We had a great civil union ceremony on July 3, 2008, in Wellington, New Zealand. Because it was right after Labphon 11, we were fortunate enough to be joined by many of our friends. We had a honeymoon in the South Pacific, which was pretty much a dream come true for me. We live in an apartment in a high-rise in beautiful Downtown Minneapolis It's filled with pop-culture artifacts and books, books, books, and more books. And a cat, Carrie Munson-Burk. We are fortunate to be in the heart of the Twin Cities, one of the nicest places in the country to live.

CarrieLou
Carrie Munson-Burk

Benjamin Munson, Island Cat (Rarotonga, 7/3/2008)

KevinAndMary
Kevin Burk, Mary Beckman, MCWOP 2008

Ben
Benny Munson-Ellis

Kevin Burk, Carrie Munson-Burk, Benjamin Munson

External Links

My officially sanctioned, University-maintained Web Profile, featuring one heckuva hideous picture!

Praat, a tool no person interested in speech can live without

R, because there are many ways to look at numbers


The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.