Speaker-by-speaker and dialect-by-dialect, people don't all speak in the same way. Prof. Heffner's research focuses on plasticity in speech perception, examining how individuals cope with this variation through learning and adaptation. We learn new phonetic categories when we learn a new language. We adapt to variation in the speech of others in our native language. These two processes require brains to be plastic, to change with experience. Prof. Heffner studies how it does that, and what happens when brains aren't working properly. 

• Heffner, C. C., Myers, E. B., & Gracco, V. L. (2022). Impaired perceptual phonetic plasticity in Parkinson’s Disease. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152(1): 511-523.
• Heffner, C. C., Fuhrmeister, P., Luthra, S., Mechtenberg, H., Saltzman, D., & Myers, E. B. (2022). Reliability for perceptual flexibility in speech: Identification, learning, and adaptation. Brain and Language, 226: 105070.
• Heffner, C. C., & Myers, E. B. (2021). Individual differences in phonetic plasticity across native and non-native contexts. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 64(10): 3720-3733.
• Heffner, C. C., Idsardi, W. J., & Newman, R. S. (2019). Constraints on learning disjunctive, unidimensional auditory and phonetic categories. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 81(4): 958-980.
  
• Heffner, C. C., Newman, R. S., & Idsardi, W. J. (2017). Support for context effects on segmentation and segments depends on the context. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 79(3): 964-988.

For a list of all publications, see Google Scholar profile.

• CDS 199: UB Seminar - Human Language and Animal Cognition
• CDS 389: General and Speech Acoustics
• CDS 428/528: Neural Basis of Communication