Maria L. Flecha-Garcia, Ph.D. (Marisa) Post-doctoral Researcher Department of Computer Science The University of Texas at El Paso El Paso, Texas, 79968-0518 Email: mlflecha at utep edu Phone: 915 - 747-8959 Fax: 915 - 747-5030
	Biographical Sketch
	Maria Flecha-Garcia joined the department in February 2008 as a Post-doctoral Researcher in the Interactive Systems Group. In 2006 she received her Ph.D. degree in Linguistics from The University of Edinburgh (U.K.). She also obtained an M.Sc. degree in Cognitive Science and Natural Language from the same university in 1998. Between 1999 and 2005 she did some work as Research Associate on various European projects in the Department of Linguistics and the School of Informatics at The University of Edinburgh. She was a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Oregon Health & Science University (2004-2005). Dr. Flecha-Garcia's research interests include speech perception and production, dialogue, non-verbal communication, and multimodal communication systems.

Current Work

Dr. Flecha-Garcia is currently working with Dr. David Novick and Dr. Nigel Ward on a project involving comparisons of verbal and non-verbal behaviours between speakers of Arabic and of American English. One of the goals is to gather information that could help avoid misinterpretations of behaviours in a foreign culture and thus develop better intercultural relations.

Previous Work: References

Flecha-Garcia, M. L. 2007. Non-verbal communication in dialogue: Alignment between eyebrow raises and pitch accents in English. In Proceedings of CogSci-2007, page 1753, Austin.

Flecha-Garcia, M. L. 2006. Eyebrow raising, discourse structure, and utterance function in face-to-face dialogue. In Proceedings of CogSci-2006, page 1311-1316, Vancouver.

Flecha-Garcia, M. L. 2006. Eyebrow Raising in Dialogue: Discourse Structure, Utterance Function, and Pitch Accents. Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, U.K.

Nicholson, Hannele, E. G. Bard, A. H. Anderson, M. L. Flecha-Garcia, D. Kenicer, L. Smallwood, J. Mullin, R. Lickley, and Y. Chen 2003. Disfluency under feedback and time pressure. In Proceedings of EUROSPEECH-03, pages 205-208, Geneva.

Flecha-Garcia, M. L. 1998. Investigation of a possible McGurk effect based on perceived ethnicity Master's thesis, The University of Edinburgh, September.