Susannah Levi
New York University, NY·Psychology
Voices and accents we have not heard before are often harder to understand. As listeners grow familiar with a talker, the words become clearer.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Social Science
- Topics
speech perception
talker familiarity
foreign accent
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Test whether familiarizing listeners with a specific talker's voice makes words and phrases spoken by that talker easier to remember than those from unfamiliar talkers, even when the words are clearly understood.
- Test whether familiarity with a specific foreign accent improves memory for words and phrases spoken in that accent compared with an unfamiliar foreign accent.
- Examine whether familiarity with a talker or accent improves listeners' memory for new information presented in a longer lecture, as a model of classroom learning.
More about the research
A deeper question remains open: if every word is heard correctly, does an unfamiliar voice or accent still make the message harder to understand and remember? Listening to a substitute teacher, for example, might make a lesson harder to recall. If accents affect comprehension and memory, they could also shape how speakers are judged, which could reinforce biases in school and job opportunities.
Why it matters
Listeners hear many regional and international accents in classrooms, workplaces and job interviews. If unfamiliar accents reduce comprehension or memory even when words are understood, that could unfairly affect how speakers are judged. These findings could inform auditory training approaches to reduce such effects and inform understanding of accent-related bias in education and employment.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael Brown
Villanova University, PA·Psychology·Early-career
Identify which sound information listeners use to tell spoken words apart by recording brain responses in the first few hundred milliseconds after hearing speech.
Fernando Llanos Lucas
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Neuroscience
Compare how speakers of languages with simpler versus more complex sound systems perceive key speech features, using auditory perception tasks.
Ian Mertes
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Neuroscience
Determine whether medial olivocochlear (MOC) reflex strength, measured by contralateral inhibition of otoacoustic emissions, predicts whether normal-hearing adults report difficulty understanding speech in background noise.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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