October 05, 2007
Fredericka Bell-Berti, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of the
Department of Speech, Communication Sciences and Theatre at St.
John’s University, has been elected to a three-year term on the
12-member Executive Council of the Acoustical Society of
America. The Council conducts the affairs of the
Society.
An active member of the Society, the premier international
scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and
technology of sound, Dr. Bell-Berti was elected a Fellow in 1991.
She has served on numerous ASA committees and chaired its
committees on Education in Acoustics and Long Term Planning.
“I have valued my membership in the Acoustical Society of
America because of the intellectual stimulation offered by the
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and the
Society’s meetings,” she says. “I am honored to have been elected
and look forward to serving the Society as a member of the
Executive Council.”
Bell-Berti anticipates that over the next three years—beyond
attending meetings of the Council and its technical committees—she
will monitor administrative operations; act as liaison between the
Council and the ASA committees on program-related matters; and
serve on ad hoc committees and task forces created to study and
recommend actions on new topics of interest to the Society.
A Speech Scientist
With an undergraduate degree in biology and a doctorate in Speech
and Hearing Sciences, both from City University of New York,
Bell-Berti--who refers to herself as a “speech scientist”--has
managed to marry the two fields in her research on speech motor
control.
“Speech is the most finely coordinated motor activity that most
humans engage in,’ she explains. “It involves the coordination of
more than 80 muscles and that and the timing of muscle actions must
often be within one-fiftieth and one-hundredth of a second or the
speech will be distorted.”
Speech is an untaught behavior, the St. John’s College professor
points out, one that most humans don’t consciously learn.
It’s almost universal, she continues, with only a fraction of
persons who do not develop speech naturally. She asks almost
rhetorically, “What other motor activities do nearly all persons
develop without formally being taught to do them?”
In her Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology courses,
Bell-Berti examines the motor control of speech (which muscles are
working in the tongue, lips, jaws and larynx and how the brain
instructs those muscles); phonetics (how sounds are produced, how
they are perceived, what acoustical characteristics they have in
common); and cross-language speech issues (different dialects,
speech variations, patterns and styles). Currently, she’s looking
at the cross-language speech issues of non-native speakers of
English and how they learn to produce sounds not present in their
first language, most particularly vowel sounds.
Involved in a multitude of professional organizations--including
the ASA and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, where
she is also a Fellow--Bell-Berti still finds time in her busy
schedule for mentoring. For almost a decade, she has been
working with students in the Ronald E. McNair Scholars
Program and, in 2001, began mentoring students at Bronx High
School of Science.
St. Vincent de Paul
Teacher/Scholar
In 1997, in recognition of her dedication to her students and her
work, the University named her a
St. Vincent de Paul Teacher/Scholar, one of a dozen faculty
members to receive the honor since the program began in the
mid-1990s.
“The St. Vincent de Paul award committee looks for faculty
members who have displayed a long track record of teaching
excellence in combination with significant research work,” says
Maura Flannery, Ph.D., Director of the University’s Center for
Teaching and Learning and Professor of Biology in the College of
Professional Studies. “It’s the most prestigious teaching award at
St. John’s, with the most stringent requirements.”