Message from Chancellor Fox: One of UCSD’s greatest institutional strengths is the breadth and depth of faculty research on a range of important topics. Each month, Chancellor’s Corner will showcase cross-disciplinary faculty expertise in a specific area. I invite you to learn more about the work of these scholars, and I hope you share my pride in their achievements and their contributions to society.

SPEECH & COMMUNICATION

Amalia Arvaniti
Amalia Arvaniti is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics. Her research interests include the phonology of intonation and its phonetic realization, the phonetics and phonology of stress and rhythm, speech timing, and the interaction of stress, rhythm, intonation and phrasing in shaping a language’s prosody. More…

Eric Baković
Eric Baković is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics. His research is in phonological theory, which is in general concerned with finding linguistically significant generalizations behind the formal similarities and differences among the sound patterns of different human languages. More…

Nicholas Christenfeld
Nicholas Christenfeld is a professor in the Department of Psychology. His areas of research include social psychology and communication. He has addressed topics such as why some people say “um” so often and why some people talk so much. He’s also investigating the effects of stress on health and the effect of hormones on human behavior. More…

Sarah Creel
Sarah Creel is an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science. In her research, she uses a variety of methodologies to explore how children and adults learn and process complex acoustic information, especially words, and also other types of temporally-patterned stimuli such as music. More…

Diana Deutsch
Diana Deutsch is a professor in the Department of Psychology. She conducts research on perception and memory for sounds, particularly music. She also explores ways in which we hold musical information in memory, and in which we relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. More…

Jeff Elman
Jeff Elman is a distinguished professor in the Department of Cognitive Science and Interim Dean for the Division of Social Sciences. His primary research interests are on language processing and learning. In his early work, he was interested in speech perception, and what mechanisms make it possible for humans to perceive complex acoustic inputs with such apparent ease. More recently, he’s studied both sentence-level and discourse-level language phenomena, as well as developmental studies that focus on language learning in the first year of life. More…

John Haviland
Professor John Haviland is an anthropological linguist, with interests in the social life of language. His major research has been on Tzotzil (Mayan) in highland Chiapas, Mexico, and its neighbors, as well as on languages from the area north of Cooktown, in far north Queensland, Australia. More…

Rachel Mayberry
Rachel Mayberry is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics. She investigates critical period effects on language development and processing with the goal of constructing a model of language comprehension that takes into account the factors of experience in early life and sensory-motor modality. More…

Ana Celia Zentella
Ana Celia Zentella is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She is one of the foremost researchers in what she has named “anthro-political linguistics.” She is a central figure in the study of U.S. Latin varieties of Spanish and English, Spanglish, and language socialization in Latin families. More…

** To learn more about other campus faculty scholars and areas of expertise, please visit the searchable UCSD Faculty Experts Database at: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/facultyExperts/

** Read more Spotlight on Faculty Research topics