B.S. in Psychology, University of Pittsburgh

I am a student in the Cognitive Neuroscience PhD program at CMU. My research is focused primarily on speech processing in the brain. What I find fascinating about speech is its connection to language: both our pronunciation and perception of speech are highly dependent on our linguistic experience. This suggests that there are some processes in the brain which are active during both the perception and production of speech. In order to understand what these processes are doing, I am currently running an experiment investigating how individuals change their pronunciations when the speech they are listening to changes in subtle ways. Results so far suggest that people do change their pronunciation when the speech they hear changes, but often in surprising and unexpected ways.