While Terry Gottfried’s official title is professor of psychology, he would be just as comfortable handing out business cards that identified him as a “speech scientist.” Gottfried is enthusiastically passionate about language, in part, because of the many interdisciplinary aspects involved in the mechanisms by which humans decode spoken language. “That’s my intellectual focus. I tend to look across disciplines to see the connections,” said Gottfried, who joined the psychology department in 1986. “I see convergence where others may see divergence.”
A specialist in second language acquisition, Gottfried has focused his most recent research on Mandarin Chinese and the ability of non-native listeners to identify the subtle differences in syllable pitch that produce totally different words. With a ready supply of conservatory students, part of his investigation centers on the connection between music and language and whether musicians, because of their background using musical tones, have an inherent advantage in learning Mandarin.
“I’m interested in the characteristics that speech and music have in common and what things might be helpful in learning tonal languages,” said Gottfried, who only speaks a few words of Chinese himself. Gottfried and research assistant Yangqing (Lucie) Xu ’09 presented their findings this summer in Paris at a joint meeting of the AcousticalSociety of America, the European Acoustical Association, and the Société Française d’Acoustique. The abstract of that poster presentation, “Effect of musical experience on Mandarin tone and vowel discrimination and imitation,” co-authored by Xu was published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
Next spring, Gottfried will assume the directorship of the Freshman Studies program, a role he feels fits perfectly with his interdisciplinary scholarship. “We look at the nature of speech from the perspective of psychology, linguistics, biology, and even physics for the acoustics. In Freshman Studies, we also address questions from a variety of perspectives, so there is a real connection between my work as a scholar and what we’re doing in Freshman Studies.”
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