Kuniko Nielsen

Professor of Linguistics
118 Fitzgerald House
(248) 364-8807
[email protected]

Research Interests

• Cognitive representations of speech sounds and their individual variability
• Phonetic imitation and accommodation
• Link between speech perception and production categories
• Lexical effects on speech perception and production

Selected Publications

Nielsen, K., & Scarborough, R. (2024). On the target of phonetic convergence: Acoustic and linguistic aspects of pitch accent imitation. Journal of Phonetics, 107, 101372.

Nielsen, K. and Scarborough, R. (2023). Feature-specific perceptual sensitivity to within-category variations. Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 107-111.

Nielsen, K. and Scarborough, R. (2019). Perceptual target of phonetic accommodation: a pattern within a speaker’s phonetic system or the raw acoustic signal?  Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1635-1639.

Mielke, J. & Nielsen, K. (2018). Voice Onset Time in English voiceless stops is affected by following postvocalic liquids and voiceless onsets. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 144 (4), 2166-2177.

Zellou, G., Scarborough, R., & Nielsen, K. (2016). Phonetic imitation of coarticulatory vowel nasalization. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140(5), 3560-3575.

Nielsen, K. (2015). Continuous versus categorical aspects of Japanese consecutive devoicing. Journal of Phonetics, 52, 70-88.

Nielsen, K. (2014). Phonetic imitation by young children and its developmental changes. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 57(6), 2065-2075.

Mielke, J., Nielsen, K., & Magloughlin, L. V. (2013). Phonetic imitation by individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Investigating the role of procedural and declarative memory. In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (Vol. 19, p. 060142).

Nielsen, K. (2012). Japanese consecutive devoicing as a phonetic process: the relative contribution of conditioning factors and its speaker variability. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics No.111, 162-176.

Nielsen, K. (2011). Effect of lexical frequency and neighborhood density on audiovisual spoken word recognition. Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1482-1485.

Nielsen, K. (2011). Specificity and abstractness of VOT imitation. Journal of Phonetics, 39, 132-142.

Nielsen, K. (2010). Phonetic imitation of Japanese vowel devoicing. Proceedings of INTERSPEECH-2010, 1553-1556.

Nielsen, K. and Wilson, C. (2008). A Hierarchical Bayesian Model of Multi-level Phonetic Imitation. Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 335-343

Nielsen, K. (2007). Implicit Phonetic Imitation is constrained by Phonemic Contrast. Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1961-1964.

Nielsen, K. (2006). Specificity and Generalizability of Spontaneous Phonetic Imitation. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. 

Courses Taught

LIN 1101 - The Humanity of Language
LIN 2201 - Introduction to Linguistics
LIN 4303 - Introduction to Phonology
LIN 4305 - Phonetic Theory
LIN 4334 - Language Acquisition
LIN 4340 - Language Related Disorders
LIN 4409 - Studies in the Structure of a Language