Melissa Baese-Berk

Dr. Melissa Baese-Berk studies the way we understand, produce, and learn spoken language, with an emphasis on second-language acquisition. She uses experimental and corpus-based methods to investigate how speakers and listeners produce and perceive language and how various cognitive, linguistic, and social factors impact these abilities. Some current projects examine communication between health-care providers and aging patients, the relationship between perception and production among learners of second languages, and a collaborative project examining what neural activity in mice during perception can tell us about how humans perceive speech. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the James S. McDonnell Foundation.