| Brown University | B.A. | 1971 Psychology of Language |
| University of Connecticut | M.A. | 1973 Psychology |
| University of Connecticut | Ph.D. | 1977 Psychology |
| 1976-1992 | Assistant/Associate/Professor of Psychology, Dartmouth College | |
| 1992-2009 | President and Director of Research, Haskins Laboratories | |
| 1992-present | Professor of Psychology, University of Connecticut |
Board of Directors, International Society for Ecological Psychology
Panel Member, Perception, Action, Cognition, National Science Foundation
Scientific Advisory Board, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
Consulting Editor, Journal of Memory and Language, Ecological Psychology, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1987
Fellow, Acoustical Society of America, 1996
Member, Society of Experimental Psychologists, 2001
Carol Fowler’s research is directed at the “objects” of speech perception. That is, she designs much of her research to explore what, at the level of language forms, listeners perceive when they perceive speech. She finds that listeners use acoustic speech information (and visual information when it is available) to identify linguistically significant vocal tract gestures. This counterintuitive finding can be rationalized in terms of a “parity constraint” for speech understanding. For communication to take place, listeners have to identify the language forms that talkers produce. If those language forms are gestural, as there is reason to suppose, then these are the forms that listeners should perceive. Another research line is to explore language use as a public, between-person activity. To that end, with collaborators, she has explored how language use serves as a “coordination device”—that is, as a means by which individuals can work together to achieve joint goals. She is a former President and Director of Research at Haskins Laboratories.
