Susannah Levi
Associate Professor; Director of Undergraduate Studies
Communicative Sciences and Disorders
212-998-5676
Susannah Levi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders. Her research focuses on spoken language processing, including how aspects of a listener (e.g., languages spoken, reading ability, language ability) and of a spoken utterance (e.g., native versus nonnative speech, talker familiarity, semantic predictability) interact during processing.
Her past research has examined whether people sound the same when speaking different languages and whether being familiar with a speaker's voice in one language helps a listener understand that speaker in a different language. Her current work expands on this to examine whether children, like adults, also show a processing benefit when listening to familiar talkers. She is also exploring whether language processing can be improved for children and adults with language and reading disorders using speaker familiarity.
Dr. Levi received her doctorate from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington, completed a postdoctoral research position in the Department of Brain and Psychological Sciences at Indiana University. Prior to coming to NYU, she taught at the University of Michigan. She is currently the Director of the Undergraduate Program in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders. Click her for CV.
Selected Publications
- Levi, S.V. (2024). Home language experience shapes which skills are used during unfamiliar speech processing. Languages, 9(5), 159
- Harel, D., *Goudelias, D., *Cheng, H-S., Baese-Berk, M.M., Theodore, R.M., & Levi, S.V. (2024). Examining the relationship between multiple tests of receptive vocabulary. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 67, 595-605.
- Houle, N., Lerario, M.P, and Levi, S.V. (2023). Spectral analysis of strident fricatives in cisgender and transfeminine speakers. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 154, 3089-3100.Baese-Berk, M.M., Levi, S.V., & Van Engen, K. J. (2023). Intelligibility as a measure of speech perception: Current approaches, challenges, and recommendations. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 153, 68-76
- Levi, S.V. (2022). Teaching Acoustic Phonetics to undergraduates in communication sciences and disorders: Course structure and sample projects. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152 (1), 651-658
- *Houle, N., †Goudelias, D., Lerario, M.P., Levi, S.V. (2022). Effect of anchor term on auditory-perceptual ratings of feminine and masculine speakers. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 65, 2064–2080
- *Abu El Adas, S. & Levi, S.V. (2022). Phonotactic and lexical factors in talker discrimination and identification. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 84, 1788-1804
- *Kabakoff, H., †Kharlemenko, J., Levy, E., & Levi, S.V. (2021). Differences in perceptual assimilation following training. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America: Express Letters, 1(4), 045201.
- *Ross, J.P., *Lilley, K.D., Clopper, C.G., Pardo, J.S., & Levi, S.V. (2021). Effects of dialect-specific features and familiarity on cross-dialect phonetic convergence. Journal of Phonetics, 86. 101041
- *Houle, N. & Levi, S. V. (2021). Effect of phonation on perception of Femininity/Masculinity in transgender and cisgender speakers. Journal of Voice.
- *Houle, N. & Levi, S. V. (2020). Acoustic differences between voiced and whispered speech in gender diverse speakers. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
- *Quinto, A., *Abu El Adas, S., & Levi, S. V. (2020). Re-examining the effect of top-down linguistic information on speaker-voice discrimination. Cognitive Science, 44
- *Kabakoff, H, *Go, G., & Levi, S. V. (2020). Training a nonnative vowel contrast with a distributional learning paradigm results in improved perception and production. Journal of Phonetics, 78.
- Levi, S. V., Harel, D., & Schwartz, R. G. (2019). Language ability and the Familiar Talker Advantage: Generalizing to unfamiliar talkers is what matters. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 62(5), 1427-1436.
- Levi, S. V. (2019). Methodological considerations for interpreting the language familiarity effect in talker processing. WIREs Cognitive Science, 10(2)
- *Case, J., Seyfarth, S., & Levi, S. V. (2018b). Short-term implicit voice learning leads to a Familiar Talker Advantage: The role of encoding specificity. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America – Express Letters, 144(6), EL497-EL502
- Case, J.*, Seyfarth, S., & Levi, S. V. (2018a). Does implicit voice learning improve spoken language processing? Implications for clinical practice. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 61, 1251-1260. DOI:10.1044/2018_JSLHR-L-17-0298.
- Levi, S. V. (2018). Another bilingual advantage? Perception of talker-voice information. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 21(3), 523-536.doi:10.1017/S1366728917000153.