Professor Tartter's interests in psycholinguistics are from a multidisciplinary approach, including principally, cognitive psychology and linguistics, but also neurolinguistics, computer science, sociolinguistics and education. In the last three years she has been engaged in administration with concomitant slowing of research productivity, as Acting Dean of the Division of Social Science.

Dr. Tartter has three published books: a 1986 textbook, Language Processes, and a two volume revision published in 1998 by Sage Publications, Inc.: Language and Its Normal Processing and Language in Atypical Populations. Over the last ten years, Dr. Tartter has worked in normal speech perception (focusing on identification of content, speaker and emotion information in normal and whispered speech), speech perception and speech production processes in cochlear inplant patients (profoundly deafened individuals with a prosthesis which electrically stimulates auditory nerve fibres to produce a sound sensation), an educational intervention to improve literacy and academic orientation of Harlem schoolchildren, and most recently, an ERP study on metaphor comprehension resolving a critical question as to whether metaphors are initially seen as anomalous and then reprocessed or whether the correct meaning is constructed from the get-go. Future and current research projects continue work in normal speech and language, moving into auditory and speech processing with learning disabilities, and into the exploring the changing nature of language as a result of instant read/write in instant messages and chatrooms.

Dr. Tartter's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and the Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education.

Sample publications include:

(1) “Hearing smiles and frowns in normal whisper registers,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 96, (1994)

(2) “Speech changes following reimplantation from a single-channel to a multichannel cochlear implant", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 92, (1992)

(3) Tartter, V. (1998). Language and its normal processes. Sage

(4) Tartter, V. (1998).Language in atypical populations. Sage

(5) Tartter, V. , Gomes, H. Dubrovsky, B., Molholm, S., & Vala Stewart, R. (2002). Novel metaphors appear anomalous at least momentarily: Evidence from N400. Brain and Language, 80, 488-509.

 

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