The overarching question underlying most of Hertz's research is what role universal principles of human speech perception play in the organization of speech/sound patterns in language. She is currently developing a theory of how listeners extract phonological structure and other information, such as speaker identity, from the continuous speech signal. Hertz is testing various hypotheses related to this theory through perceptual experiments involving utterances that contain mixes of natural and synthetic speech segments. More information about her research as well as its applications to speech synthesis and other areas of speech processing can be found at www.novaspeech.com .