Maria-Gabriella DI BENEDETTO

LaMIT - Lexical access Model for Italian

This project was conceived while I was on sabbatical leave at Harvard and MIT in 2019-2020 as the William Bentinck-Smith Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and as a research affiliate of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I am grateful to the Radcliffe Institute for providing an amazing framework in which I could develop this vision and also for the opportunity offered by the “Research Partner” program by which Harvard students can work on projects carried out by Fellows of the Institute.
My long standing collaboration with the Speech Communication Group of MIT is crucial to this project. The Speech Communication Group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a speech recognition system - for English - over a span of about 20 years, based on the lexical access model proposed by Kenneth Stevens; Italian is the first language beyond English to be investigated. Exploring a new language and also have the possibility to expand further to other languages, will provide insight into how Stevens' approach has universal application across languages, with relevant implications for understanding how the human brain recognizes speech.
This project is therefore founded on a collaborative effort between three Institutions: my home Institution, Sapienza University of Rome, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Participants to the project

Sapienza University of Rome

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Harvard University