Dr Michael Tyler

• Biography
• Areas of Research / Teaching Expertise
• Grants / Current Projects
• Awards and Recognition
• Publications
• Contact Details

Biography

The University of Western Sydney has been a magnet in Michael Tyler's career. He first completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Sydney (1993-1995), double-majoring in Psychology and Linguistics, followed by an honours year at the University of Western Sydney (1996, Supervisor: Dr. Kate Stevens). After beginning his PhD in Psychology at the University of New South Wales in 1998, under the supervision of Prof. Denis Burnham, he soon transferred to the University of Western Sydney, where Prof. Burnham had taken up the position of Director of MARCS Auditory Laboratories.

After completing his PhD he moved to France (Dijon) for a one-year postdoctoral research appointment at the Laboratoire d'Etude de l'Apprentissage et du Développement (CNRS), Université de Bourgogne and then to the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) for a further 7 months. After nearly two years overseas, the UWS magnet pulled him back again. He returned to MARCS in 2005 to work with Prof. Catherine Best on cross-language speech perception. In 2008 he took up a position as Lecturer in the School of Psychology and he continues to collaborate with his colleagues in MARCS Auditory Laboratories.

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Areas of Research / Teaching Expertise

Second Language Speech Learning; Cross-Language Speech Perception; Spoken Word Recognition; Statistical Language Learning Developmental and Auditory Psycholinguistics; Research Methodology

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Grants / Current Projects

Development of second language phonetic and phonological categories, ARC Discovery Grant (Tyler, M. D.):

This project is the first empirical test of a new model of second language (L2) speech learning, PAM-L2 (Best & Tyler, 2007), which is an extension to the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM; Best, 1995). It
aims to demonstrate that, in contrast to the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995), a) perception should be considered at multiple levels (phonetic AND phonological); b) phonetic speech categories can be overlapping; and c) longitudinal perceptual improvements are modulated by L2 vocabulary size. Measurements of eye fixations and a new Test of Phonetic Similarity will show that PAM-L2 is the only current model to account for development of second language speech perception.

Early ontogeny of attunement to the language environment, US NIH Grant (PI: C. Best):

As infants acquire the ambient language, they become attuned to its articulatory properties and to how they are harnessed for phonological functions. This project's long-term goal is to understand the way in which native language experience comes to shape speech perception and production. How do infants, who can acquire any human language, become native speaker-listeners of the ambient adult language? Language-specific constraints on adults' speech perception and production, and their emergence in infants, provide a window on this process, which we examine in studies of language-specific effects in young children and adults.

If you and your child are interested in participating in research in the MARCS Babylab.

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Awards and Recognition

PhD of the Year, Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA), 2003.
Australian Psychological Society Prize in Psychology 1997.
University Medal, University of Western Sydney, 1997.

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Publications

Refereed Journal Articles

Bundgaard-Nielsen, R. L., Best, C. T., & Tyler, M. D. (in press). Vocabulary size matters: The assimilation of L2 Australian English vowels to L1 Japanese vowel categories. Applied Psycholinguistics.

Johnson, E. K., & Tyler, M. D. (2010). Testing the limits of statistical learning for word segmentation. Developmental Science, 13, 339-345 doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00886.x

Best, C. T., Tyler, M. D., Gooding, T. N., Orlando, C. B., & Quann, C. A. (2009). Development of phonological constancy: Toddlers’ perception of native- and Jamaican-accented words. Psychological Science, 20, 539-542.

Tyler, M. D., & Cutler, A. (2009). Cross-language differences in cue use for speech segmentation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126, 367-376.

Tyler, M. D., Jones, C., Grebennikov, L., Leigh, G., Noble, W., & Burnham, D. (2009). Effect of caption rate on the comprehension of educational television programmes by deaf school students. Deafness & Education International, 11, 152-162.

Burnham, D., Leigh, G., Noble, W., Jones, C., Tyler, M., Grebennikov, L. & Varley, A. (2008).Parameters in television captioning for deaf and hard of hearing adults: Effects of caption rate vs. text reduction on comprehension. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 13, 391-404.

Tyler, M. D., & Burnham, D. K. (2006). Orthographic influences on phonemic deletion response times. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59, 2010-2031.

Perruchet, P., Peereman, R., & Tyler , M. D. (2006). Do we need algebraic-like computations? A reply to Bonatti, Peña, Nespor, and Mehler (2006) . Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135, 322-326.

Tyler, M. D., Tyler, L., & Burnham, D. K. (2005). The Delayed Trigger Voice Key: An improved analogue voice key for psycholinguistic research. Behavior Research Methods, 37, 139-147.

Perruchet, P., Tyler , M. D., Galland, N., & Peereman, R. (2004). Learning nonadjacent dependencies: No need for algebraic-like computations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 573-583.

Tyler, M. D. (2001).Resource consumption as a function of topic knowledge in nonnative and native comprehension. Language Learning, 51, 257-280.

Book Chapters

Best, C. T., & Tyler, M. D. (2007). Nonnative and second-language speech perception: Commonalities and complementarities. In M. J. Munro & O.-S. Bohn (Eds.), Second language speech learning: The role of language experience in speech perception and production (pp. 13-34). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Burnham, D., Tyler , M., & Horlyck, S. (2002). Periods of speech perception development and their vestiges in adulthood. In P. Burmeister, T. Piske, & A. Rohde (Eds.), An integrated view of language development: Papers in honor of Henning Wode (pp. 281-300). Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.

For a full list of publications.

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