Carol Fowler facts for kids
Carol Ann Fowler is an American scientist who studies how people understand and produce speech. She is an expert in a field called experimental psychology. From 1992 to 2008, she was the president and research director at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut. She also teaches psychology at the University of Connecticut and linguistics and psychology at Yale University. She earned her college degree from Brown University in 1971. Later, she received her master's degree in 1973 and her Ph.D. in psychology in 1977, both from the University of Connecticut.
Understanding How We Speak
Carol Ann Fowler is well-known for her ideas about how we hear and understand speech. This is called speech perception. She believes we understand speech directly from the sounds we hear. It's like seeing an object directly, without needing to guess what it is.
Speech and How We Make Sounds
Dr. Fowler has also studied the connection between hearing speech and making speech. She looks at how our brains process sounds and how our mouths and vocal cords then create those sounds. She also researched how we learn to imitate sounds and words.
How Languages Affect Each Other
Her research also explored how speaking two languages can influence each other. For example, she studied people in Montreal who spoke both English and French. She found that the way they made certain sounds in one language could be slightly different because they also spoke the other language. This shows how our brains adapt when we learn and use more than one language.
In 2016, a science journal called Ecological Psychology published many papers honoring her important work. This showed how much her ideas have helped the field of psychology.
