Language and Speech Research
Biological and psychological aspects of speech and language are studied using a variety of techniques and expertise, in populations of healthy adults, individuals suffering from developmental disorders, patients who suffered brain damage, and typically developing children. EEG, MEG, ERPs and fMRI are all employed in the study of the neural pathways underpinning the perception of speech sounds, speech segmentation, and affective and prosodic information. Behavioural studies with typically developing preschoolers and children with autism investigate the contribution of perceptual and psychological properties of speech (e.g. affect, intention), as well as the perceptual properties of objects (eg shape, colour, texture), to the cognitive realisation of meaning, as well as the role of associative learning in lexical acquisition. The relationship between sound perception (eg pitch, intensity, rhythm, timbre) and reading abilities, and the relationship between literacy, music and timbre, including populations with amusia and dyslexia, are being studied using both EEG and behavioural techniques. The neuropsychology of language and memory (including word retrieval and production), the effects of speech and language intervention for children with cerebral palsy, and biological and environmental influences on language acquisition, are also studied using behavioural methodologies. This work is closely linked to our interests in Auditory Neuroscience and to research being conducted in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences.
Staff:
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Dr Kai Alter
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Professor Tim Griffiths
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Professor David Howard
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Professor Nick Miller
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Dr Christopher Petkov
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Selected Publications:
- Ischebeck AK, Friederici AD, Alter K (2008) Processing prosodic boundaries in natural and hummed speech: An fMRI study. Cerebral Cortex 18: 541-552
- von Kriegstein K, Smith DRR, Patterson RD, Ives DT, Griffiths TD (2007) Neural representation of auditory size in the human voice and in sounds from other resonant sources. Current Biology 17: 1123-1128
- Howard D, Hickin J, Redmond T, Clark P, Best W (2006) Re-visiting 'semantic facilitation' of word retrieval for people with aphasia: facilitation yes but semantic no. Cortex 42: 946-962
- Mietz A, Toepel U, Ischebeck A, Alter K (2008) Inadequate and infrequent are not alike: ERPs to deviant prosodic patterns in spoken sentence comprehension. Brain and Language 104: 159-169
- von Kriegstein K, Warren JD, Ives DT, Patterson RD, Griffiths TD (2006) Processing the acoustic effect of size in speech sounds. Neuroimage 32: 368-375
- O'Hanlon CG, Roberson D (2006) Learning in context: Linguistic and attentional constraints on children's color term learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 94: 275-300
- Howard D, Nickels L, Coltheart M, Cole-Virtue J (2006) Cumulative semantic inhibition in picture naming: experimental and computational studies. Cognition 100: 464-482
- Pennington L, Goldbart J, Marshall J (2005) Direct speech and language therapy for children with cerebral palsy: findings from a systematic review. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 47: 57-63
- Stokes SF, Klee T, Perry Carson C, Carson DA (2005) Phonemic implicational feature hierarchy of phonological contrasts for English-speaking children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 48: 817-833
- Miller N, Noble E, Jones D, Allcock L, Burn D (2008) How do I sound to me: perceived changes in communication in Parkinson's disease. Clinical Rehabilitation 22: 14-22
