Speech processing in Oceania

I am just back from a weeklong trip to Australia and New Zealand, which gave me a chance to talk about speech research on the other side of the world.

In Australia, I spoke at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders--Kanazawa Institute of Technology MEG Workshop hosted by Macquarie University (home of the Australian Hearing Hub) in Sydney. This workshop paid tribute to Hisashi Kado, who played an enormously important role in developing and installing MEG machines around the world. It was fascinating and moving to hear stories about his leadership and vision that continue to influence so many researchers.

In New Zealand, I spoke to the New Zealand Institute for Langugage, Brain and Behaviour at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch about cognitive challenges associated with understanding acoustically-degraded speech, and some of the brain networks associated with this processing.

So, a good trip, and—Tim Tams for the lab!

Visit to the University of Missouri

On Friday I had the chance to give a talk at Mizzou. Given that it's less than 2 hours from Saint Louis, I can't believe it took me this long to get out there. It was great to meet with so many great folks in cognitive science including Jeff Johnson, Nelson Cowan, and Jeff Rouder. Hopefully I'll be back before too long!

Talk at SfN

I'm in Washington DC for the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN). SfN was my first scientific conference (San Diego, 2001) and it always has a special place in my heart: I'm always inspired by the diversity of methods and approaches to studying the brain.

This year I had the pleasure of speaking in a symposium on hearing impairment that Art Wingfield and I organized. Andy King started the symposium off by talking about animal models of hearing loss, and how hearing impairment affects spatial localization abilities. Barb Shinn-Cunningham talked about the impact of hearing loss on auditory attention in human listeners. Paul Miller talked about some elegant cognitive modeling work he has done to tease apart cognitive processes involved in processing degraded speech. And I finished up the session by attempting to summarize the rather large literature on the cognitive effects of acoustic challenge.

One analogy to hearing impairment is to think about having blurred vision. Those of us who wear glasses can attest to the fact that it's possible to see things without them, but it can be more difficult (and we may make more errors!). The analogy to vision is imperfect, however, because we frequently have the opportunity to look at objects around us for as long as we'd like to. When listening to degraded speech, we have only a brief moment to understand what we hear. If we are unable to, we need to maintain a representation in memory to have any hope of recovering meaning.

The simple take home message is that hearing loss impacts neural functioning at multiple levels, from "low level" responses in auditory cortex to affecting verbal short-term memory and attention-based performance monitoring in humans. Although the details are still actively being investigated it was inspiring to see, again, the multidisciplinary approaches being taken.

Talk at the Gerontological Society of America

I'm in Washington, DC today to give a talk at the Gerontological Society of America Annual Meeting. I'm speaking as part of a very interesting symposium organized by Frank Lin and Michelle Carlson: "Hearing impairment, cognition, and brain function—insights from epidemiological and clinical studies". Other speakers include Jerker Rönnberg and Jennifer Deal. For my part, I'm giving an overview of how MRI studies have helped us understand the effects of hearing loss on brain structure and function. I'm glad to have a chance to talk about these important issues with this audience!

Workshop on language evolution and diversity at the MPI in Nijmegen

The next few weeks are busy with several talks (and a grant resubmission). I'm in The Netherlands this week to speak at the a workshop on language evolution and diversity at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. My talk was on the different ways in which we see variability in human neural responses to speech and language. For example, listeners processing speech that is acoustically challenging or linguistically complex, for example, typically show increased brain activity that can occur outside of traditional "speech" regions. Individual differences in listeners' abilities, such as level of hearing impairment, also impact the brain mechanisms required to successfully understand what has been said.

This is a fun conference because it brings together speakers with a wide variety of research interests. Today we heard about a proposed project on speech rate normalization (using oscillatory entrainment, which makes me happy), the variety of languages and multilingual speakers in Senegal and Peru, and consistency of how people act to "repair" speech across different cultures. I'm looking forward to more talks tomorrow!