Alexandra Jesse

PhD, 2005, University of California Santa Cruz

Center for Research on Families

Initiative in Cognitive Science

Neuroscience & Behavior Graduate Program

My research focuses within the area of psycholinguistics on speech perception, with a special emphasis on audiovisual speech perception. That is, I investigate how we process speech from hearing and seeing a speaker talk (lip-reading). We use this visual information not only to understand what the speaker says, but also to learn, for example, about a speaker's idiosyncratic way of speaking or to learn the meaning of novel words. Topics investigated are the consequences of aging on speech perception; individual differences; perceptual learning of speaker idiosyncrasies; the dynamics of audiovisual spoken-word recognition; learning of multisensory relationships; temporal cross-modal synchrony and binding; multisensory perception. These issues are addressed with a variety of methods (e.g., eye tracking, event-related potentials, motion tracking), testing young and older adults as well as infants and toddlers.

For more information, please visit the website of my lab.

My teaching has focused on these undergraduate-level courses

Introduction to Statistics (Psych 240)

Cognitive Psychology (Psych 315)

Psychology of Language (Psych 318)

Selected list of publications (for a full list go here):

† = student author

Jesse, A., & Bartoli†, M. (2018). Learning to recognize unfamiliar talkers: Listeners rapidly form representations of facial dynamic signatures. Cognition, 176, 195-208. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.03.018 

Jesse, A., Poellmann, K., & Kong, Y.-Y. (2017). English listeners use suprasegmental cues to lexical stress early during spoken-word recognition. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 60, 190-198. doi:10.1044/2016_JSLHR-H-15-0340

Francisco†, A. A., Jesse, A., Groen, M. A., & McQueen, J. M. (2017). A general audiovisual temporal processing deficit in adult dyslexic readers. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 60, 144-158. doi:10.1044/2016_JSLHR-H-15-0375

Jesse, A., & Johnson, E. (2012). Prosodic temporal alignment of co-speech gestures to speech facilitates referent resolution. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38(6), 1567-1587. doi: 10.1037/a0027921

Jesse, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2011). Positional effects in the lexical retuning of speech perception. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18,943-956. doi:10.3758/s13423-011-0129-2.

Dr. Jesse investigates how humans recognize speech from hearing and seeing a speaker. Dr. Jesse was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1999. She has received a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2005, working with Dr. Dominic Massaro. Dr. Jesse then worked as an independent researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands, funding her research program through several awards from the German Research Foundation, the Max Planck Society, and through a career award (VENI) from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Dr. Jesse joined the UMass faculty in 2010. She is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Linguistics. Dr. Jesse serves as an Executive Board member of the Auditory-Visual Speech Association (AVISA).