Michael Studdert-Kennedy

Michael Studdert-Kennedy is an American psychologist and speech scientist. He is well known for his contributions to studies of speech perception, the motor theory of speech perception, and the evolution of language, among other areas. He is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Connecticut and a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Yale University. He is the former President (1986–1992) of Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut. He is also a member of the Haskins Laboratories Board of Directors and was Chairman of the Board from 1988 until 2001.

Career

Michael Studdert-Kennedy's early work at Haskins Laboratories included work on their reading machine project. In the 1960s, Studdert-Kennedy and Donald Shankweiler used a dichotic listening technique (presenting different nonsense syllables simultaneously to opposite ears) to demonstrate the dissociation of phonetic (speech) and auditory (nonspeech) perception by finding that phonetic structure devoid of meaning is an integral part of language, typically processed in the left cerebral hemisphere. Alvin Liberman, Franklin S. Cooper, Shankweiler, and Studdert-Kennedy summarized and interpreted fifteen years of research in "Perception of the Speech Code," still among the most cited papers in the speech literature. It set the agenda for many years of research at Haskins and elsewhere by describing speech as a code in which speakers overlap (or coarticulate) segments to form syllables. In recent years he has written a number of papers on the evolution of language, including work with Louis Goldstein.

Representative publications

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