Profile picture of Melissa (Lisa) Redford

Melissa (Lisa) Redford

Professor
Department Head
Linguistics
Phone: 541-346-3818
Office: 379 Straub Hall
Office Hours: Wednesdays 12-2pm on Zoom, otherwise by appointment
Research Interests: suprasegmental sound patterns; speech planning & production; child language acquisition

Research

Dr. Redford research program is designed to further a developmentally sensitive theory of spoken language production; one where the representations and processes relevant to speaking are understood to result from language acquisition that is shaped by social-interactive successes, the development of executive functioning (i.e., cognition pertaining to sequencing and planning), and the development of speech motor control. Her current emprirical work focuses on the development of articulatory timing skill, the relationship between phrase-level representations and planning processes, and on the coordination of language and breathing during speaking. Overall, Dr. Redford's research is designed to challenge existing theories of spoken language acquisition and production. One goal is to argue that psychologically-plausible linguistic representations are developmentally structured and so may bear little semblance to those proposed for language description. Another is to provide a biologically sensible framework for advancing empirical work on normal and disordered spoken language.

Selected Publications:

Davis, M., & Redford, M.A. (2019). The emergence of discrete perceptual-motor units in a production model that assumes holistic phonological representations. Frontiers in Psychology, Language Sciences, 10, 2121. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02121

Redford, M.A. (2019). Speech production from a developmental perspective. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research,62, 2946–2962. doi: 10.1044/2019_JSLHR-S-CSMC7-18-0130  

Redford, M.A., Kallay, J., Bogdanov, S., & Vatikiotis-Bateson, E. (2018). Leveraging audiovisual speech perception to measure anticipatory coarticulation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America144, 2447-2461. doi: 10.1121/1.5064783. 

Redford, M.A. (2018). Grammatical word production across metrical contexts in school-aged children’s and adults’ speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 61, 1339-1354.

Redford, M.A., Kapatsinski, V., & Cornell-Fabiano, J. (2018). Lay listener classification and evaluation of typical and atypical children's speech. Language and Speech61, 277-302. doi: 10.1177/0023830917717758.