CNL Lunch

Rochelle Newman

Interactions across Competing Streams of Speech

Thursday March 6th, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

IMost research in the area of speech perception has focused on describing different stages of speech perception individually; little work has investigated how these stages interact with one another. For example, most research on how listeners adjust for a talker's speaking rate has examined situations in which only a single individual is speaking. In this type of situation, there is little risk of information from an alternate speech stream influencing or interfering with the process of identifying the target speaker's words. In the real world, however, the listener may have to separate the speech of different talkers at the same time that individual words are being recognized. Here, information from one talker might alter how information from a second talker is processed. The present research examines these multi-talker situations to see whether the brain is influenced by speech information coming from alternate (and inappropriate) sources of sound.