Welcome to the Speech Communication Lab!
The research in our lab aims to identify the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying spoken language processing, particularly in the context of cross-linguistic communication. Our most current line of work has a strong focus on understanding how experience-dependent plasticity occurs in speech perception. We investigate adaptive mechanisms across time scales ranging from milliseconds to months and years: from low-level signal transformations that occur early in the neural speech stream (normalization), to rapid adaptations to talker-specific statistics that occur within minutes but can persist for days if not weeks (perceptual recalibration), all the way to longer-lasting re-organization of linguistic representations both within a listener’s first language (e.g., perceptual learning over prolonged exposure) and during the acquisition of additional languages in adulthood (second language acquisition).
Our techniques include:
Psycholinguistic experimentation (laboratory-based and web-based crowdsourcing)
Brain imaging (fMRI)
Computational modeling (Bayesian ideal observers and adaptors linking the statistics of the speech input in production to quantitative predictions about perception)
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Speech perception and production, neural correlates of spoken language processing, perceptual learning (and disorders), native and non-native speech communication, language plasticity, computational modeling, language acquisition, bilingualism, voice perception.