Adam
Buchwald
Office: 665 Broadway, Suite 910
Phone: 212-998-5260
Fax: 212-995-4356
Email: buchwald AT nyu DOT edu
Assistant Professor
Department of Speech-Language
Pathology and Audiology
Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and
Human Development
New York University
New York, NY 10012
Click for CV with links to papers
Research Interests
My interests span several subdisciplines of cognitive science including psycholinguistics, speech science, theoretical and laboratory phonetics and phonology, cognitive neuropsychology, and computation. My research agenda is based on combining research efforts in these areas to permit a multi-layered investigation of particular issues, and focuses on the production and perception of spoken and written language.
Spoken Language Production
Spoken language production is a remarkable human faculty, in which we quickly (2-3 words/second) and accurately (errors ~1000 words) produce a stream of words to convey underlying meaning. My research on spoken language production focuses on phonetics and phonology, and attempts to further our understanding of the cognitive processes and representations of linguistic structure that are used in producing spoken language. To these ends, my work involves studying the articulations and corresponding acoustics of both neurologically damaged and neurologically intact populations (Buchwald, 2005; Buchwald, Rapp & Stone, 2007), as well as examining the sound structure patterns and restrictions seen in English (Buchwald, in press).
In literate societies, one can argue that the production of written language is of equal (if not greater) value to the production of spoken language. Still, the cognitive system underlying spelling and written language has been relatively neglected by researchers when compared to its spoken counterpart. My work in this vein has used the patterns of production errors from individuals with acquired dysgraphia (an acquired spelling impairment) to better understand the nature of this cognitive system. This work has revealed that the classic distinction of long-term memory and working memory is replicated in the spelling system, with the possibility of one of these two memory systems being damaged while the other remains intact (Buchwald and Rapp, in revision). In addition, this work has shown that our mental representation of written words includes information about orthographic consonant-vowel (CV) status which is separate from phonological CV status (Buchwald & Rapp, 2006).
Spoken Language Perception
Perception of spoken language is also a remarkable skill which we do with little effort. My work in this domain has focused on two main issues. First, I have addressed the effects of visual speech information on auditory speech perception and word recognition. We have known that observers will use visual cues to augment auditory speech perception under a variety of listening condition, and that these two sources of information are both used in forming a percept, and in work with David Pisoni in the Speech Research Laboratory, I have explored the necessary conditions for audiovisual speech perception (Buchwald, Winters & Pisoni, under review). An additional project in collaboration with Robert Felty addresses the nature of lexical organization and lexical access by examining the content of errors made on spoken word recognition tasks. This work involves a set of over 1400 stimuli and more than 20,000 word recognition errors, and has resulted in several presentations (Felty & Buchwald, 2007; Buchwald & Felty, 2008; Felty & Buchwald, 2008) focusing on both lexical and phonological analyses of the errors.
Theoretical linguistics
In Theoretical Linguistics, my work focuses on formal issues in phonology. Certain classes of OT grammars - called bidirectional - have been useful for thinking about problems in semantics and the syntax-semantics interface (e.g., Buchwald, Schwartz, Seidl, and Smolensky 2002). However, these grammars have not been easily adapted to recalcitrant problems in phonology that would appear to be amenable to such a solution. I am currently working to characterize the problem such formalisms face in accounting for phonological data. I am also interested in various cross-linguistic phenomena, such as place and voicing assimilation, and the relationship between phonological and phonetic accounts of these phenomena. This interest is founded in my general interest in the relationship of categorical and gradient properties of linguistic representation and processing.
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