Lecture on ‘ Neural entrainment during speech perception by adults and infants ’ by Paul Iverson

On Thursday, February 15, Prof. Paul Iverson (Department of Speech Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London), will deliver a lecture on ‘Neural entrainment during speech perception by adults and infants’ at the HSE Center for Language and Brain.

Abstract

Infants begin to tune into the sounds of their language during the first year of life, which bootstraps word learning and facilitates native-language speech recognition but can interfere with second-language learning during adulthood. Although this is well established, our understanding of this topic is limited by the amount of data that can be collected with existing methods, particularly for infants; most studies focus on isolated phonetic contrasts such as /b/-/p/. This talk will present work that uses new EEG methodologies to generate perceptual maps for a broader range of phonetic contrasts for infants and adults, examine how individuals track the acoustics of continuous speech (i.e., neural entrainment), and examine how this entrainment is modulated by listening effort and attention. The overall goal is to move beyond the examination of isolated syllable contrasts in order to better understand the development of auditory-phonetic processing for real continuous speech.

Time: from 4 pm to 5.30 pm.

Venue: Staraya Basmannaya st. 21/4, room 510.

The language of the lecture is English, no translation will be provided.

If you need a pass to HSE, please contact Natalia Borisova – borisova.n.u@gmail.com.