Grant: Operating Grant

Speech is a complex , dynamic and noisy signal. Speech perception , in most young normally hearing people at least, is amazingly efficient despite such variability, which is all the more striking given that listening conditions are often poor (e.g. , there is background noise) and we often hear (and comprehend ) speech while distracted by another task. Speech perception is probably so robust because our brains have multiple, complementary, ways of representing critical speech features , and because we can use attention , knowledge and experience to enhance comprehension of degraded speech. The work proposed here will use recent advances in functional brain imaging methods to study how speech utterances are processed by the brain and how this is influenced by attention and prior knowledge. Given the processing constraints imposed by a finite brain , what speech-relevant information does the brain select to process; how is that information represented and processed in the brain; and how is processing modified by attention and knowledge? A greater understanding of the way in which the brain is organized to comprehend speech, particularly degraded and noisy speech , is essential if we are to minimize disability in the rapidly growing number of people with hearing loss.