www.ucl.ac.uk/pals

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.

News and upcoming events

  • We are thrilled to welcome our new Postdoc, Takayuki Nagamine, to the lab. Looking forward to the great work ahead!

  • Congratulations to Han who just aced his viva and has become Dr. Han! He will soon start his postdoc journey at the UCL Institute of Child Health and will be based in the Great Ormond Street Hospital. We're super proud of him!
 
  • Patti, together with her collaborators Dr Chris Carignan (UCL) and Prof Adamantios Gafos (University of Potsdam), received a grant from the Leverhulme Trust for the project 'Speech production processes in resolving articulatory variation'. Our lab will have a new postdoc in August for the project!
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  • 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.
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  • At the ENRICH event Patti gave a talk on "Populations affected by listening effort.
   
  • 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.
     
  • 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​
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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”

Twitter (@pattiadank)