About This Project

Babies do it. Teenagers do it. Adults even do it (though maybe with a little more effort). Humans have the amazing capacity to learn and comprehend language: sometimes several! In order to begin to understand spoken language, listeners of any age must first segment the continuous and complex speech stream into individual words. Unlike written language, which cues word boundaries with white space, no such unambiguous or consistent cue to word boundaries exists in spoken language. ItwouldbeasthoughwehadtofindthewordslikethisallthetimeIt'swaymoredifficult!

Yet, current research cannot definitively answer the question “How do people segment words from continuous speech?” This research aims to understand how patterns of pitch and time in speech facilitate word segmentation by having students at our university listen to a made-up language and learn words.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

How does the human brain respond to speech patterns? What does that response indicate about how people segment spoken language?

We have compelling behavioral evidence that pitch and temporal information influence how people learn words in a language. Yet we cannot know for sure what cues people use to do this without real-time measurements of how people's brains respond as they're listening to speech.

The next step of our research requires us to purchase equipment that records the electrical activity of the brain in order to answer our overarching research question. Neural activity while listening to speech will reveal what cues in the acoustic signal people use to segment words.

What is the significance of this project?

This research has implications for how babies learn their first language, or how adults learn a 2nd (or 3rd, 4th, 5th...) language. When learning a language, listeners can make use of a rich world of cues by immersing themselves in that language environment. Our research provides scientific evidence for the intuition that although daunting, moving to Spain will help you learn Spanish better than learning from a textbook.

Although asking people to make judgments about speech and seeing how pitch and time cues impact their responses tells us whether pitch and time information is used during language learning and comprehension, our further research incorporating EEG recording will dig deeper, illuminating precisely how and when these cues are used.

Overall, this research is important for understanding the perceptual and neural mechanisms underlying processing of pitch and time cues in language and how these cues contribute to language learning and comprehension. Previous research has revealed a number of cues that facilitate speech segmentation and word learning (such has the probability of co-occurrence of syllables) but few have addressed the role of patterns of pitch and time in these processes.

In addition, learning about these underlying perceptual and neural mechanisms will potentially inform us about pitch and temporal processing deficits linked to neurological disorders -- such as dyslexia, autism, stuttering -- and furthermore could shed light on how less efficient processing of these cues with old age or degraded hearing may influence speech understanding abilities.

What are the goals of the project?

All funds from this campaign will be used to help purchase EEG equipment.

Electroencephalography, or EEG, is a fast, convenient, and non-invasive method of recording the electrical activity of the brain at the scalp. This technique is well-tailored to answering research questions that require information about when a neural process is occurring. Because we are particularly interested in how the brain responds to events that occur fairly quickly, such as the perception of a spoken word (which occurs over milliseconds), we want to “image” activity in the brain as it takes place. EEG enables us to see how the brain is responding to an event within milliseconds.

Here's a picture of our undergraduate research assistants learning to use some EEG equipment

Funding this equipment is a collaborative effort. Our lab along with a couple of other labs in the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN) area at Michigan State University (MSU) will be paying out of pocket for whatever we cannot manage to raise by crowdfunding.

In addition to specifically helping our lab to achieve our own research goals, this equipment will be accessible to other members of our research community at MSU for research and training in a CCN-community EEG facility. This facility will bring researchers from different areas of psychology together, encouraging more collaboration and creating a melting pot of scientific perspectives, skills, and ideas, benefiting both researchers and the community in general.

For more information about how we graduate students (Elisa and Katherine) are funded, and the various sources of funding for different projects in the TAP lab, check out our website or feel free to email to ask!