#speech processing

Help this little robot and his friends learn a human language!

Our lab is currently looking for participants to take part in a linguistic online experiment. It will take about 20 minutes and you will need to use a desktop computer or laptop since you will need to use a physical keyboard.

We are looking for native English and native German speakers that are at least 18 years old and have no known hearing impairment. Note that if you are a native English speaker, it’s important that you don’t speak German. 

If you are a native English speaker, click here to get to the study.

If you are a native German speaker, click here to get to the study.

Thank you very much! Some people have reported problems trying to open the experiment in Safari, but other browsers such as Firefox or Chrome should work fine.

"what??"

a) it gets harder to understand what's being said to me, and so

b) my brain seems to reallocate other resources to trying to understand speech, and so

c) then my ability to actually speak coherently is compromised, and so

Unraveling mechanisms of speech processing in the brain

Why Musical Training is Beneficial in Processing Speech

Musical training is associated with various cognitive improvements and pervasive plasticity in human brains. Among its merits, musical training is thought to enhance the cognitive and neurobiological foundation of speech processing, particularly in challenging listening environments, such as in a noisy restaurant. However, the brain mechanisms supporting any such potential advantages related to speech perception are not well specified.

It's like I've got a module in my head that turns abstract ideas into ideas of sounds, another that turns ideas of sounds into actual sound, and another that turns ideas of sounds into typing. So, the first module dictates stuff to one of the other two, but sometimes there's extra noise and a transcription error occurs. So, "hear" becomes "year" or something.

I don't really notice other people doing this, but I'm also not sure I would notice. Like, I already know I "autocorrect" things I read/hear.

Speech is also "single threaded" for me. Like, I can't listen to two people at once, but I also can't read and listen at the same time. Reading and listening both go through that intermediate layer of "ideas of sounds" for which there is only "one ear". The best I can do is try to multiplex the signals and try to sort them out on the other side.

I also read ,much slower than most people, but tend to have much better comprehension of what I read. So, I kind of wonder if that's related. Like, maybe because I'm more consciously aware of the translation process, I get a more accurate translation?

In addition to speech detection, dog brains could also distinguish between Spanish and Hungarian.

These language-specific activity patterns were found in another brain region, the secondary auditory cortex. Interestingly, the older the dog was, the better their brain distinguished between the familiar and the unfamiliar language. “Each language is characterized by a variety of auditory regularities. Our findings suggest that during their lives with humans, dogs pick up on the auditory regularities of the language they are exposed to” — says Hernández-Pérez.

“This study showed for the first time that a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages.