Fred Cummins :
I am a PhD student in the Departments of Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Together with Bob Port, Mike Gasser and others, I have spent some time studying ways in which we might model human audition. This turns out to be a huge project, and any one of us can only tackle a small part of it. We have looked at ways in which we might remember sequences of sounds. One of my main interests is speech, and especially speech rhythm. As we will be looking at the problem of speech rhythm in detail in this course, I won't go into any detail here except to say that I'm constantly amazed at how many sub-problems crop up once you decide to tackle speech rhythm head-on. My background includes computer science, which is a blessing, as computer models are definitely the best tools we have these days for doing research in cognitive science.