Throughout this episode, Chiara Repetti-Ludlow, a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Mellon's Neuroscience Institute, asks us to consider the essentials of speech processing and its constraints. We hear phonetics, but we understand phonology. How and why? To answer those questions, Chiara takes a highly interdisciplinary approach. We know that linguistics is an interdisciplinary field—it has to be. We can't divorce language from its cognitive, physical, and social apparatuses, nor can language be extricated from human interaction. But academic inquiry has a way of siloing different subfields. And, frankly, it's easier to stick to a rigid set of questions and methodologies. Chiara Repetti-Ludlow's research is exactly what we often hope for in linguistics: interdisciplinary, multi-textured, and conscious of the strengths of different subfields. By bringing together methods and insights from neurolinguistics, phonetics-phonology, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics, Chiara's research attempts to answer granular questions about speech processing.

Chiara is a current postdoctoral research fellow in the Carnegie Mellon University Neuroscience Institute. She earned her PhD in Linguistics at NYU.

Chiara’s Website

Continuous Perception and Graded Categorization: Electrophysiological Evidence for a Linear Relationship Between the Acoustic Signal and Perceptual Encoding of Speech

Regularization in the face of variable input: Children's acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American English

Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð ~ θ]s of change

Sahil Lutha