Regular Days at Haskins: Monday - Friday
Research Interests
Dr. Nam proposed a model of how syllable structure that promises to reveal how people put segments together in speech, something that has the potential of revealing a great deal about disorders of speech organization like stuttering and apraxia. Dr. Nam is also well known to his peers as one of the major developers of Haskins Laboratories speech production model (aka TADA model), which is the first full computational model of the speech capacity, one of the most fundamental but least understood human capacities. TADA model has been increasingly employed and cited in the field of speech pathology, speech engineering, sign language studies, second language acquisition, let alone linguistic theories such as phonology and phonetics. Dr. Nam used the model to unlock the mechanics of babbling, essential to understanding why some children learn speech properly, and some do not. His model is further being implemented in a new type of speech recognizer that promises to revolutionize how computers recognize speech.
Representative Publications
Nam, H., & Saltzman, E. (2003). A Competitive, Coupled Oscillator Model of Syllable Structure. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the XIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona, Spain. (PDF)
Saltzman, E., Nam, H., Goldstein, L., & Byrd, D. (2006). The Distinctions Between State, Parameter and Graph Dynamics in Sensorimotor Control and Coordination Motor Control and Learning (pp. 63-73).
Nam, H. (2007). Syllable-level intergestural timing model: Split-gesture dynamics focusing on positional asymmetry and moraic structure. In J. Cole & J. I. Hualde (Eds.), Laboratory Phonology 9 (Phonology and Phonetics) (pp. 483-506). Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Saltzman, E., Nam, H., Krivokapic, J., & Goldstein, L. (2008). A task-dynamic toolkit for modeling the effects of prosodic structure on articulation. Paper presented at the 4th conference on speech prosody, Campinas, Brazil.
Goldstein, L., Nam, H., Saltzman, E., & Chitoran, I. (2009). Coupled oscillator planning model of speech timing and syllable structure. In G. Fant, H. Fujisaki & J. Shen (Eds.), Frontiers in Phonetics and Speech Science (pp. 239-250). Beijing: The Commercial Press.
Giulivi, S., Whalen, D. H., Goldstein, L., Nam, H., & Levitt, A. (accepted). An Articulatory Phonology Account of Preferred Consonant-Vowel Combinations.
Mitra, V., Nam, H. (co-first author), Espy-Wilson, C., Saltzman, E., & Goldstein, L. (2009). Noise robustness of Tract Variables and their application to Speech Recognition. Paper presented at the Interspeech, Brighton, U.K.
Tyrone, M., Nam, H., Saltzman, E., Marthur, G., & Goldstein, L. (2010). Prosody and Movement in American Sign Language: A Task-Dynamics Approach. Paper presented at the Speech Prosody, Chicago, IL.
Nam, H., Goldstein, L., & Saltzman, E. (2010). Self-organization of syllable structure: a coupled oscillator model. In F. Pellegrino, E. Marisco & I. Chitoran (Eds.), Approaches to phonological complexity. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Iskarous, K., Nam, H., & Whalen, D. H. (2010). Perception of articulatory dynamics from acoustic signatures. J Acoust Soc Am, 127(6). (pp. 3717-3728). (PDF)
Mitra, V., Nam, H. (co-first author), Espy-Wilson, C., Saltzman, E., & Goldstein, L. (In press). Retrieving Tract Variables from Acoustics: A comparison of different MachineLearning strategies. The IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing.
Grants
A-93: Links Between Production and Perception in Speech
A-158: Variability and error in speech production
A-159: A kinematic study of phonetic reduction in American Sign Language
