About Ellen Broselow

Faculty

Faculty Website: Ellen Broselow's website

Research Video: watch Ellen Broselow's research interest (video)

MIC Related Research

My research focuses on the sound systems of human languages: the features that are shared by all languages as well as the ways in which languages may differ. One of my major areas of research concerns the ways in which the production and perception of a foreign language is affected by the native language system. Languages may use particular acoustic cues in very different ways, and the tendency to interpret foreign language cues in terms of their use in the native language may lead to problems in speaking and understanding the foreign language. For example, in tone languages (such as Mandarin), each word has an inherent pitch melody, while in intonational languages (such as English), pitch melodies are a property of entire sentences and are used to signal such things as phrasal structure (with a falling pitch associated with the end of a statement) and the speaker's emotions (such as incredulity, approval, etc.). English speakers tend to have difficulty in learning to use and understand pitch as a signal of lexical differences rather than sentence intonation, while Mandarin speakers tend to miss the subtleties expressed by pitch melody in English.