Benjamin Munson

About

We study how children and adults learn how to speak in ways that convey their social identity, and how they perceive social and personal identity through speech and language. We study this in numerous ways and in numerous groups: adults with and without hearing loss, and children with and without.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Linguistics
• Social psychology
• Law
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Perceiving gender while perceiving language: Integrating psycholinguistics and gender theory

  Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Cognitive Science · 2021 · 63 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  There is a substantial body of literature showing that men and women speak differently and that these differences are endemic to the speech signal. However, the psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying the integration of social category perception and language are still poorly understood. Speaker attributes such as emotional state, age, sex, and race have often been treated in the literature as dissociable, but perceptual systems for social categories demonstrably rely on interdependent cognitive…

  DOI

• Making Race Visible in the Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences: A Critical Discourse Analysis

  American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology · 2021 · 38 citations

  PURPOSE: The purpose of this critical discourse analytic study is to identify how two key professional standards documents in the Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences field-the Standards for Certification document and the Essential Functions rubric-contribute to the discursive construction of the ideal speech-language pathologist and audiologist, and to examine whether the experiences and needs of people of color are taken into consideration in these documents. METHOD: Critical discourse analys…

  DOI

• The everyday speech environments of preschoolers with and without cochlear implants

  Journal of Child Language · 2024-02-16 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access

  Children who receive cochlear implants develop spoken language on a protracted timescale. The home environment facilitates speech-language development, yet it is relatively unknown how the environment differs between children with cochlear implants and typical hearing. We matched eighteen preschoolers with implants (31-65 months) to two groups of children with typical hearing: by chronological age and hearing age. Each child completed a long-form, naturalistic audio recording of their home envir…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Preschoolers rely on rich speech representations to process variable speech

  Child Development · 2023-05-19 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  To learn language, children must map variable input to categories such as phones and words. How do children process variation and distinguish between variable pronunciations ("shoup" for soup) versus new words? The unique sensory experience of children with cochlear implants, who learn speech through their device's degraded signal, lends new insight into this question. In a mispronunciation sensitivity eyetracking task, children with implants (N = 33), and typical hearing (N = 24; 36-66 months;…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acknowledging language variation and its power: Keys to justice and equity in applied psycholinguistics

  Applied Psycholinguistics · 2023-04-04 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Recent studies have demonstrated incontrovertibly that person perception influences language perception. Much of this research is predicated on the notion that social categories are stable constructs that are perceived similarly by members of various speech communities. Power differentials necessarily impact the legibility of the social performances circumscribed by macrosociological categories and thus bely any claim to objectivity in these categorization systems. Developing a more jus…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Race, Ethnicity, and Speech Intelligibility in Normal Hearing and Hearing Impairment

  NIH · $423k · 2019–2023

• NIH Grant R56DC002932

  NIH · $149k · 2011

• DHB / Collaborative Research: Using Machine Learning to Model the Interplay of Production Dynamics and Perception Dynamics in Phonological Acquisition

  NSF · $130k · 2008–2011

Frequent coauthors

• Jan Edwards

  University of Maryland, College Park

  75 shared

• Mary E. Beckman

  36 shared

• Alayo Tripp

  University of Minnesota

  18 shared

• Sarah K. Schellinger

  16 shared

• Lisa M. D. Archibald

  16 shared

• Marc F. Joanisse

  Western University

  16 shared

• Molly Babel

  12 shared

• Nancy Pearl Solomon

  Stanford University

  11 shared

Labs

• SASS LabPI

Education

• PhD, Speech and Hearing Science

  The Ohio State University

• B.A., Political Science, Linguistics, Russian

  University at Buffalo

• M.A., Speech and Hearing Science

  The Ohio State University

Awards & honors

• CLA Student Board Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year (20…
• Editor's Award, Outstanding Research Article in Hearing (200…
• Award for Early Career Achievements in Research, American Sp…
• Arthur "Red" Motley Teaching Award (2006)
• McKnight Presidential Fellowship (September 2006 - August 20…

Similar researchers at University of Minnesota

• Charles R. (Randy) Fletcherh-69
• Timothy Faceh-20
• Carol Anne Kleeh-19