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about us:

How does our brain decode vibrations in the air into words and sentences? Understanding everyday conversations appears an easy and automatic task, particularly as we acquire the capacity to do so seemingly effortlessly in early childhood, yet how we manage this remarkable ability is poorly understood. Human listeners can understand each other under a wide variety of everyday listening conditions - at a crowded party, over a poor telephone connection - and can understand speakers irrespective of their speech style and regional or foreign accent. Our research uses state-of-the-art neuroscientific tools involving functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) of the brain to try to understand this fundamentally human ability. We use fMRI to pinpoint the location of specific processes in the brain and can then use TMS to temporarily disturb the brain’s electrical signalling. By applying TMS to someone’s head we can (temporarily) disrupt brain activity in a healthy person.

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News and upcoming events

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• IMPORTANT: Patti has a new grant awarded from the Leverhulme Trust “Speech production processes in resolving articulatory variation”. The project will start in May 2024, and we are currently recruiting a postdoc for 36 months to work on the project with the team (Patti Adank, Chris Carignan, and Adamantios Gafos. See here. Please submit your application before or on 31 January 2024.

 

• Han will present a poster "Neural processing of degraded speech under divided attention: an fMRI - machine learning study" at the SpiN Workshop in Germany in January 2024. 

 

• Patti and Han will present a poster "Perceptual learning of dysarthric speech requires phonological processing: A dual-task study" at the SpiN Workshop in Germany in January 2024. 

 

• Hannah, Yuchunzi and Patti published their paper "Automatic imitation of speech is enhanced for non-native sounds" in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review!

 

• Han, Rongru, Yu and Patti published their paper "Perceptual Learning of Noise-Vocoded Speech Under Divided Attention" in Trends in Hearing!

 

• Hannah, Yuchunzi, Tony and Patti published their paper "Automatic imitation of human and computer-generated vocal stimuli" in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review!

 

• Helen, Gwijde and Patti published their paper "Speech motor facilitation is not affected by ageing but is modulated by task demands during speech perception" in Neuropsychologia!​

 

• Patti published her paper "Eye gaze and perceptual adaptation to audiovisual degraded speech" in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research!

 

• Han and Patti will present a poster "Robust perceptual learning of noise-vocoded speech under divided attention: A dual-task paradigm" at the Experimental Psychology Society meeting in January 2022.

 

• Tony, Shego, and Patti will give a talk "Automatic imitation: Stimulus response compatibility effects across domains are robust to cognitive load" at the Experimental Psychology Society meeting in January 2022.

 

• Tony published his paper "The Relevance of the Availability of Visual Speech Cues During Adaptation to Noise-Vocoded Speech" in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research!​

 

• The newly minted PhDs—Max, Gwijde, Shego, together with Tony, have embarked on their new jouneys. The lab will miss you!

 

• Due to the turbulent times facing lab-based research, the Speech on the Brain Lab has now moved their research online! Patti, Han, Hannah, Eliza, Alanoud and Tony are either currently, or will shortly be collecting data.

 

• Max published his paper "The relationship between talker acoustics, intelligibility, and effort in degraded listening conditions" in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America!

 

• Congratulations to Patti, who has received accreditation as a supervisor from the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE).

 

• Max, Gwiide, and Patti gave a TMS demo on the 3rd of March at the ENRICH event at the Royal Institution with support from Magstim.

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• At the ENRICH event Patti gave a talk on "Populations affected by listening effort.

 

• Dan Kennedy-Higgins’ paper “The Causal Role of Left and Right Superior Temporal Gyri in Speech Perception in Noise: A Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study” was published a nearly access in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

 

• On February 18th, Patti delivered a talk to the IMC on “Automatic limitation of speech: investigating mechanisms governing perception-production links".

 

• On February 19th, Patti gave a talk in CFIN on "Neural processing of variation in speech: the role of action observation and motor imagery". She was invited by Andreas Højlund from ICM

 

• We welcome Han (PhD Candidate) and Hannah (MRes SLC and 1+3 Candidate) to the lab! See the lab members page for more information on their project.

 

• Tony published his paper "Exploring Variation Between Artificial Grammar Learning Experiments: Outlining a Meta-Analysis Approach" in Topics in Cognitive Science!

 

• Jasmine and Patti published their paper "Emotional state dependence facilitates automatic imitation of visual speech" in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology! 

 

• Patti will be giving a talk in Newcastle on the 24th of October.

 

• Max is currently on secondment at Sonova in Switzerland untl January 2020​

 

• Shego and Patti published a paper with the title 'Sensorimotor training modulates automatic imitation of visual speech' in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review!

 

• Gwijde and Patti published a paper with the title 'Motor imagery of speech: the involvement of primary motor cortex in manual and articulatory motor imagery' in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience!

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• Patti received a grant from the Leverhulme Trust for £177,000 for the project "Mechanisms Governing Imitation of Speech"

• Patti received a grant from the BIAL foundation for €45,500 for the project “Motor Imagery in Speech Processing”

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