Kuniko Nielsen

Associate Professor of Linguistics and Department Chair
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. 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.

Nielsen, K. (2005). Generalization of phonetic imitation across place of articulation. Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Plasticity in Speech Perception, 47-50. 

Nielsen, K. (2005). Investigation of SLI Children's Semantic Knowledge through Intonation Patterns. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics no.13, Papers in Psycholinguistics 2, 76-86.

Nielsen, K. (2004). Segmental Differences in the Visual Contribution to Speech Intelligibility. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2533-2536. 

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 Development in Children
LIN 4409 - Studies in the Structure of a Language