Email: akcooper [at] u.northwestern.edu
Mail: 2016 Sheridan Rd, Evanston, IL 60208
Office: Swift Hall 007

Research Interests

• native and non-native speech perception
• factors influencing production and perceptual intelligibility
• lexical tone perception and production
• music and language

Recent News

23.10.11

Back from an excursion from Chicago up to Urbana-Champaign for the 17th Mid-Continental Phonetics & Phonology Conference to present our work on “Communicatively- and prosodically-driven hyper-articulation in English”. Our thanks to the organizers for a lovely, congenial workshop!

18.08.11

I had the privilege of presenting our paper, “The influence of tonal awareness and musical experience on tone word learning” at the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Hong Kong. We were also fortunate to be able to present our other paper, “Effect of semantic context on the perceptual learning of lexical tone” in the very same session!

I also want to thank the organizers of the Psycholinguistic Representation of Tone conference, a satellite of ICPhS, for bringing together researchers of lexical tone from all over the world into one room. An informative and rewarding couple of days!

27.04.11

Exciting news! I will be starting my doctoral studies in the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University in September. Additionally, I’ve had the honour to receive a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship as well.

11.19.10

I have had the distinct pleasure of being able to jet around the world of late, attending various academic conferences. It was particularly timely, however, to be able to escape the encroaching Chicago cold for the balmy beaches of Cancun, Mexico for the 2nd Pan-American/Iberian Meeting on Acoustics. I enjoyed the speech communication sessions, and had a very positive presentation overall for our poster, “Can musical aptitude and experience predict tone word learning success?”. Thanks to the organizers for a lovely conference!

10.15.10

Happy to report it was a very pleasant presentation of our EEG work, “Processing of speech and non-speech tonal information by native and nonnative tone language speakers: an event-related electrophysiological study”, at this year’s Annual Conference of the Canadian Acoustical Association in Victoria, British Columbia. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the conference hotel was perched right on the harbour, which made for a stunning back drop to the conference festivities.

10.01.10

I had the privilege of recently presenting our poster, “Cantonese tone word learning by tone and non-tone language speakers”, at Interspeech 2010 in Makuhari, a city just outside of Tokyo, Japan. My thanks to the organizers for putting on such a well-organized conference. It was nice to be able to visit Japan again, and stay on for an extra bit to do a bit of sightseeing. Can’t wait for next year’s in Florence!