ko Nielsen

Kuniko Nielsen

Associate Professor
Linguistics Department
Oakland University

1025 Human Health Building
Rochester, MI 48309-4401
email: nielsen at oakland dot edu


Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Research Interest

  • Phonetic imitation and accommodation
  • Lexical effects on speech perception and production
  • Developmental changes of phonological representations
  • Audio-visual speech perception

 

Publications

  • Nielsen, K. and Scarborough, R. (2015). Perceptual asymmetries between greater and lesser vowel nasality and VOT. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.
  • Nielsen, K. (2015). Continuous versus categorical aspects of Japanese consecutive devoicing. Journal of Phonetics, 52, 70-88.
  • Nielsen, K. (2014). Phonetic imitation by young children and its developmental changes. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 57(6), 2065-2075.
  • Nielsen, K. (2013). Investigating developmental changes in phonological representation using the imitation paradigm. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (Vol. 19, p. 060086).
  • Mielke, J., Nielsen, K., & Magloughlin, L. V. (2013). Phonetic imitation by individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Investigating the role of procedural and declarative memory. In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (Vol. 19, p. 060142).
  • Zellou, G., Scarborough, R., and Nielsen, K. (2013). Imitability of contextual vowel nasalization and interactions with lexical neighborhood density. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (Vol. 19, p. 060083).
  • Nielsen, K. (2011). Effect of lexical frequency and neighborhood density on audiovisual spoken word recognition. Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1482-1485.
  • Nielsen, K. (2011). Specificity and abstractness of VOT imitation. Journal of Phonetics, 39, 132-142.
  • Nielsen, K. (2010). Phonetic imitation of Japanese vowel devoicing. Proceedings of INTERSPEECH-2010, 1553-1556.
  • Nielsen, K. (2008). Word-level and feature-level effects in phonetic imitation (Doctoral dissertation, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES).
  • Nielsen, K. and Wilson, C. (2008). A Hierarchical Bayesian Model of Multi-level Phonetic Imitation. Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 335-343.
  • Nielsen, K. (2007). Implicit Phonetic Imitation is constrained by Phonemic Contrast. Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1961-1964.
  • Nielsen, K. (2007). The Interaction between Spontaneous Imitation and Linguistic Knowledge. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 105, 125-137.
  • Nielsen, K. (2006). Specificity and Generalizability of Spontaneous Phonetic Imitation. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing.
  • Nielsen, K. (2005). Generalization of phonetic imitation across place of articulation. Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Plasticity in Speech Perception, 47-50.
  • Nielsen, K. (2005). Investigation of SLI Children's Semantic Knowledge through Intonation Patterns. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics no.13, Papers in Psycholinguistics 2, 76-86.
  • Nielsen, K. (2005). Kiche Intonation. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 104, 45-60.
  • Nielsen, K. (2004). Segmental Differences in the Visual Contribution to Speech Intelligibility. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2533-2536.

Conference Presentations

  • (with Rebecca Scarborough) Perceptual Asymmetries between Greater and Lesser Vowel Nasality and VOT. Talk presented at the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow, UK. August 2015.
  • (with Rebecca Scarborough) Listeners’ sensitivity to nasal coarticulation and its interactions with lexical neighborhood density. Poster presented at the 169th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Pittsburgh, PA. May 2015.
  • (with Rebecca Scarborough) More vs. Less: Asymmetries in the Perception of Nasality and VOT. Talk presented at the 89th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland, OR. January 2015.
  • Developmental Changes in Phonological Representation: An investigation using the imitation paradigm. Talk presented at LabPhon 14 Satellite Workshop on “Gestural Coordination Within and Between Speakers in First Language Phonological Acquisition”. Tachikawa, Japan. July 2014.
  • (with Rebecca Scarborough and Georgia Zellou) The imitability of coarticulation: influences of phonological naturalness and lexical neighborhood density. Talk presented at the 88th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Minneapolis, MN. January 2014.
  • The imitability of coarticulatory vowel nasalization. Talk presented at Phonetics-Phonology Talk Series, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. November 2013.
  • (with Jeff Mielke and Lyra Magloughlin) Phonetic imitation by neurotypicals and individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Poster presented at LSA 13 Workshop: How the brain accommodates variability in linguistic representations. Ann Arbor, MI. July 2013.
  • (with Jeff Mielke and Lyra Magloughlin) Investigating AQ score as a factor in phonetic imitation. Poster presented at the Conference on Sources of Individual Linguistic Differences. Ottawa, Canada. March 2012.
  • Phonetic imitation by school-age children. Poster presented at the 162nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. San Diego, CA. November 2011.
  • Effect of lexical frequency and neighborhood density on audiovisual spoken word recognition. Talk presented at the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Hong Kong, China. August 2011.
  • Phonetic imitation of Japanese vowel devoicing. Poster presented at the 11th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (INTERSPEECH-2010). Makihari, Japan. September 2010.
  • Japanese vowel devoicing as a gestural overlap. Poster presented at the 12th Conference on Laboratory Phonology. Albuquerque, NM. July 2010.
  • Lexical frequency and Japanese vowel devoicing. Poster presented at the 159th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Baltimore, MD. April 2010.
  • (with Peter Graff and Kie Zuraw ) Investigating Preferential Imitation. Talk presented at the 2009 LSA meeting. San Fransisco, CA. January 2009.
  • The effect of lexical frequency on Japanese vowel devoicing. Talk presented at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Michigan Linguistics Society. Detroit, MI. October 2008.
  • (with Colin Wilson) A Bayesian Network Model of Multi-level Phonetic Imitation. Talk presented at the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Los Angeles, CA. May 2008.
  • Phonetic imitation of Japanese vowel devoicing. Talk presented at the 2008 LSA meeting. Chicago, IL. January 2008.
  • Implicit phonetic imitation is constrained by phonemic contrast. Poster presented at the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Saarbr_cken, Germany. August 2007.
  • (with Patricia Keating, Frank Manis, and Jennifer Bruno) Acoustic phonetic variability and auditory word recognition by dyslexic and nondyslexic children. Poster presented at the 152nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Honolulu, HI. December 2006.
  • The specificity and abstractness of spontaneous phonetic imitation. Poster presented at the 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. Pittsburgh, PA. September 2006.
  • The specificity and abstractness of phonetic imitation. Poster presented at the 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology. Paris, France. June 2006.
  • VOT imitation generalizes across phonemes and natural classes. Talk presented at the 2006 LSA meeting. Albuquerque, NM. January 2006.
  • The interaction between specificity and linguistic contrast. Poster presented at the 150th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Minneapolis, MN. October 2005.
  • Generalization of phonetic imitation across place of articulation. Poster presented at the ISCA Workshop on Plasticity in Speech Perception. London, UK. June 2005.
  • Generalization of the imitation effect within a natural class. Poster presented at the 149th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Vancouver, Canada. May 2005.
  • Segmental differences in the visual contribution to speech intelligibility. Poster presented at the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. Jeju, Korea. October 2004.
  • Segmental differences in the visual contribution to speech intelligibility. Poster presented at the 148th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. New York, NY. May 2004.

Projects

  • Effect of autistic traits on phonetic imitation (with Jeff Mielke)
  • Effect of neighborhood density on phonetic imitation (with Rebecca Scarborough)
  • Effect of age on phonetic imitation