Research

There’s a curious phenomenon that’s well-replicated in psychophysics: when we hear the same stimulus over and over again (say, 76 instances of passive exposure to a single audio file), we tend to show different response patterns after such an adaptation phase. These changes most often arise through “poorer” response characteristics, like increased response times. The thing is that there has never been a head-to-head comparison for whether this is a result of selective adaptation or distributional learning, and interest in it has waned in recent decades. If it’s the former, then what is happening is that feature detectors in the brain are getting fatigued. If the latter, then what is likely happening is that the statistical distributions of acoustic characteristics in the speech signal are being retuned as a result of an adaptor phase. Through a series of experiments, we seek to test this question directly.

Key references: Kleinschmidt & Jaeger (2015); Dumay & Samuel (2026)

How do listeners use beliefs about a talker's phonetic signature to constrain lexical competition in real time? When a talker raises the vowel in tack toward [eɪ] when preceding a voiced consonant, listeners who have inferred their phonetic pattern may exclude tack as a competitor more quickly. This project investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms behind this process, with a focus on whether right-lateralized voice processing regions contribute to talker-conditioned lexical access.

Key references: Trude & Brown-Schmidt (2012); Luthra et al. (2019); Righi et al. (2010)