Welcome to Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Robin Panneton

The CRLMB is very pleased to welcome Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Robin Panneton to a four-month term at the Centre. Dr. Panneton (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1985) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA. By training, she is a developmental psychologist with research interests in infant auditory perception.

Dr. Panneton is particularly interested in the development of infants’ preferences for speech patterns, how speech directs infant attention and arousal, native language recognition, and infants’ emerging dependence on visual speech (e.g., face) information. She and her students investigate these issues with infants across the first postnatal year, exploring measures of attention via behavior and psychophysiology. As a 2008 Canadian-U.S. Fulbright Research Chair at the Centre for Research on Language, Mind, and Brain, she will be collaborating with Dr. Linda Polka on a research project that will investigate sources of information that augment infants’ abilities to process linguistic information in the face of perceptual challenge (e.g., noisy backgrounds).

She will also be collaborating with Polka and Drs. David McFarland, and Marc Pell on a new project, entitled “Conversational Profiles between Infants and Caretakers: Relations to Interactional Synchrony, Developing Attention Skills, and Language Competence” (with initial start-up funding from the Centre). Dr. Panneton welcomes additional collaborations with other Centre members.

Dr. Panneton will inaugurate this year's Distinguished Lecture Series, with a talk entitled "Look at me when I talk to you!”: Infants' integration of face and voice information during speech processing," which will be held in the Redpath Museum Auditorium on Friday, October 3rd at 1:30 p.m. All are invited, and refreshments will be served after the talk.