RESEARCH
Speech Perception, Psycholinguistics, and More!
Our lab studies questions about perception and language processing across multiple levels of analysis and multiple timescales, including work on auditory perception, hearing loss, speech categorization, learning and development, and higher-level language processing.
Our research seeks to understand human listeners' ability to perceive speech and understand language. Several lines of research focus on questions such as:
- How does speech perception unfold over time, from initial acoustic cue encoding to word recognition to discourse processing? What information are listeners sensitive to at each stage of processing? How do top-down processes influence earlier stages of processing?
- How do listeners learn speech sound categories, including learning how to weight and combine multiple sources of information?
- How can we build computational models that reflect the processes used by human listeners to learn and process spoken language?
- How can we develop better hearing tests using behavioral and electrophysiological measures? How can we better fit assistive devices to allow for accurate speech recognition?
We use a variety of methods to study these processes, including psychophysical experiments, eye-tracking, cognitive neuroscience techniques, and computational modeling. Together, these approaches give us a more detailed picture of how human listeners' understand and use language.
The links below provide more information about ongoing research projects in the lab. Please contact us (wraplab@villanova.edu) if you would like to learn more.
