Linda Polka
Associate Professor
School of Communication Sciences and Disorders
McGill University
Beatty Hall, 1266 Pine Avenue West
tel: 514-398-7235
e-mail: linda.polka(at)mcgill.ca
Membership Status
Principal Member
Research Themes
Language Acquisition
Speech Science Modeling
Areas of Expertise
Speech acoustics, acoustic phonetics, speech perception, development of speech perception and production focusing on infancy, cross-language and L2 speech perception, hearing assessment, tympanometry
Current Research Interests
My research examines the development of speech perception from infancy through adulthood with a focus on developmental changes occuring in the first year of life. In current projects I am exploring the effects of age and language experience on several aspects of perceptual development including vowel and consonant perception, language preference and discrimination, and word segmentation skills. This research includes comparisons of monolingual and bilingual development and studies exploring the impact of otitis media on infant speech perception development.
Selected Publications
- Polka, L., Rvachew, S. & Mattock, K. (In press). Experiential influences on speech perception and production during infancy. In E. Hoff & M. Shatz, (Eds.), Handbook of Child Language. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
- Rvachew, S., Mattock, K., Polka, L. & Menard, L. (2006). Developmental and cross-linguistic variation in the infant vowel space:The case of Canadian English and Canadian French. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 120, 2250-2259.
- Sundara, M. Polka, L. & Genesee, F. (2006). Language experience facilitates discrimination of /d – ð/ in monolingual and bilingual acquisition of English, Cognition, 100, 369-388.
- Sundara, M., Polka, L. & Baum, S. (2006). Production of coronal stops by simultaneous bilingual adults. Bilingualism, Language, and Cognition, 9, 97-114
- Polka, L. & Rvachew, S. (2005). The impact of otitis media with effusion on infant phonetic perception. Infancy, 8, 1010-117.
- Polka, L. & Bohn, O-S. (2003). Asymmetries in vowel perception. Speech Communication, 41, 221-231.
Graduate Students
- Karen Mattock (PhD, Postdoctoral fellow, co-supervised)
- Andrea McLeod (PhD, Postdoctoral fellow)
- Monika Molnar (PhD candidate, co-supervised)
