Linda Polka, Ph.D.
Professor
BA Psychology, Slippery Rock State College
MA Experimental Psychology, University of Minnesota
PhD Psychology & Human Communication Disorders, University of South Florida
Research in the Polka lab focuses on the development of speech perception during infancy. The broad goal of this work is to understand the capacities infants bring to this task and how their speech processing changes as they acquire communication skills. Her current work is focused on two lines of research. One research line (funded by NSERC) examines how infants learn to perceive and produce phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) and how this is shaped by infant perceptual biases. She is also using a variety of tools and methods to explore how infants (and adults) respond to speech produced by an infant talker. A second line of work (funded by SSHRC) explores affective communication in parent-infant interaction. In this work, she is using perceptual coding, automated facial analysis, and infant perceptual testing to understand how infants learn to process the affective messages conveyed by their caregivers.
