Ratree Wayland

About

Professor Ratree Wayland is a faculty member in the Department of Linguistics at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Florida. Her research focuses on cross-language speech perception and production, with particular attention to lexical tone processing and acquisition. She specializes in Southeast Asian languages, as well as Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic languages. Additionally, Professor Wayland investigates the use of speech as biomarkers for neurological, cognitive, and psychiatric disorders. Her work also encompasses natural language processing, integrating linguistic insights with computational methods. She maintains an active role in both research and teaching within her department.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Speech recognition
• Artificial Intelligence
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Communication
• Visual arts
• Mathematics
• Art
• Acoustics

Selected publications

• How musical experience affects tone perception efficiency by musicians of tonal and non-tonal speakers?

  PLoS ONE · 2020 · 29 citations

  PURPOSE: To investigate if, regardless of language background (tonal or non-tonal), musicians may show stronger CP than non-musicians; To examine if native speakers of English (English or non-tonal musicians henceforth) or Mandarin Chinese (Mandarin or tonal musicians henceforth) can better accommodate multiple functions of the same acoustic cue and if musicians' sensitivity to pitch of lexical tones comes at the cost of slower processing. METHOD: English and Mandarin Musicians and non-musicians…

  DOI

• Visual analog of the acoustic amplitude envelope benefits speech perception in noise

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2020 · 25 citations

  The nature of the visual input that integrates with the audio signal to yield speech processing advantages remains controversial. This study tests the hypothesis that the information extracted for audiovisual integration includes co-occurring suprasegmental dynamic changes in the acoustic and visual signal. English sentences embedded in multi-talker babble noise were presented to native English listeners in audio-only and audiovisual modalities. A significant intelligibility enhancement with the…

  DOI

• Lenition in L2 Spanish: The Impact of Study Abroad on Phonological Acquisition

  Brain Sciences · 2024-09-21 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Objective: This study investigated the degrees of lenition, or consonantal weakening, in the production of Spanish stop consonants by native English speakers during a study abroad (SA) program. Lenition is a key phonological process in Spanish, where voiced stops (/b/, /d/, /ɡ/) typically weaken to fricatives or approximants in specific phonetic environments. For L2 learners, mastering this subtle process is essential for achieving native-like pronunciation. Methods: To assess the learners’ prog…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From sonority hierarchy to posterior probability as a measure of lenition: The case of Spanish stops

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2023 · 8 citations

  A deep learning Phonet model was evaluated as a method to measure lenition. Unlike quantitative acoustic methods, recurrent networks were trained to recognize the posterior probabilities of sonorant and continuant phonological features in a corpus of Argentinian Spanish. When applied to intervocalic and post-nasal voiced and voiceless stops, the approach yielded lenition patterns similar to those previously reported. Further, additional patterns also emerged. The results suggest the validity of…

  DOI

• The Effect of Pitch Accent on the Perception of English Lexical Stress: Evidence from English and Mandarin Chinese Listeners

  Languages · 2024-03-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The relative weighting of f0 and vowel reduction in English spoken word recognition at the sentence level were investigated in one two-alternative forced-choice word identification experiment. In the experiment, an H* pitch-accented or a deaccented word fragment (e.g., AR- in the word archive) was presented at the end of a carrier sentence for identification. The results of the experiment revealed differences in the cue weighting of English lexical stress perception between native and non-native…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Si Chen

  Google (United States)

  20 shared

• Fenqi Wang

  19 shared

• Kevin Tang

  Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

  18 shared

• Edith Kaan

  16 shared

• Rahul Sengupta

  University of Florida

  14 shared

• Takeshi Nozawa

  Ritsumeikan University

  13 shared

• Sophia Vellozzi

  University of Florida

  12 shared

• Yiqing Zhu

  University of Florida

  10 shared

Education

• Ph.D, Linguistics

  Cornell University

  1997

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