Winifred Strange received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology in 1972 at the Center for Research in Human Learning (CRHL, now the Center for Cognitive Science, CCL), University of Minnesota, where she specialized in psycholinguistics, and minored in speech & hearing sciences and linguistics. Her dissertation focused on training adult listeners to perceive non-native consonant contrasts. Since then, she has published over 80 journal articles, invited chapters and conference reports in the area of cross-language speech research.

Dr. Strange was adjunct professor and research associate at CRHL, University of Minnesota from 1972-1982. There, she collaborated under NIH funding with Dr. James Jenkins on adult speech perception research, with Dr. Patricia Broen on developmental speech perception research. She also collaborated with Japanese and Haskins Laboratories colleagues on one of the first studies of cross-language speech perception (Miyawaki et al, 1975), and began a long line of research on the perception of coarticulated vowels, in collaboration with Donald Shankweiler (Haskins Laboratories) and Robert Verbrugge (U Minnesota graduate student). 

In 1982, Dr. Strange became associate professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) at the University of South Florida (USF), where she continued her NIH-funded speech perception research focusing on two topics: perception of vowels in continuous speech and cross-language and second-language (L2) learners’ perception of non-native consonant and vowel contrasts.  Her Dynamic Specification Theory of Vowel Perception brought into focus the role of time-varying spectral and temporal information in the specification of vowels in large inventory languages (American English and German). In 1992, she organized a conference at USF on cross-language speech perception, attended by an international panel of researchers/theorists in developmental and adult speech perception and their students and postdoctoral fellows. Her edited volume “Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience:  Issues in Cross-Language Speech Research” (1995) grew out of that conference, and has served as an instructional resource for researchers/teachers in the field.

In 1998, she accepted a professorship in Speech and Hearing Sciences (now Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences) at the City University of New York (CUNY), Graduate School and University Center. There, she established the Speech Acoustics and Perception Laboratory (SAPL), where she continues research, supported by NIH and NSF, on cross-language acoustic and perceptual comparisons of coarticulated vowels in small and large inventory languages by native speakers and L2 learners. She recently coauthored a chapter with CUNY colleague, Valerie Shafer, on “Speech Perception in Second Language Learners: the Re-Education of Selective Perception” (2008) in which she presents a sketch of her working model - Automatic Selective Perception (ASP) of Speech by native and non-native listeners, which will serve as the theme of her keynote address at the Portland OR, May 2009 ASA special workshop on Cross-Language Speech Perception and Varieties of Linguistic Experience.

Return to Invited Speakers page