The Inaugural SCSD Donald G. Doehring Memorial Lecture
This lecture honors the first director of the McGill School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, who was instrumental in establishing the school with a strong focus on research and evidence-based practice.
Thursday Nov 10, 1 pm
McIntyre Medical Building
Meakins Auditorium, 5th floor Room 521
“Perceptual learning in language processing”
Dr. Rachel M. Theodore
University of Connecticut
Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Haskins Laboratories University of Connecticut
A major goal of research in the domain of speech perception is to describe how listeners achieve stable processing given the lack of invariance between the acoustic input and the perceptual categories that support language comprehension. A rich research literature has demonstrated that listeners solve the lack of invariance problem, in part, by dynamically modifying the mapping to phonetic category structure to reflect systematic variation in the input. In this talk, I will present findings from behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational approaches that shed light on the mechanisms that support such perceptual learning, highlighting (1) intersections between perceptual learning for speech perception and voice recognition, (2) the role of general cognitive processing (e.g., attention) in perceptual learning, (3) relationships between perceptual learning and reading ability, and (4) implications of perceptual learning in populations with language disorders.