Adaptive processing of spoken language: flexible communication in health, disease and disorder

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Speech is the most important and complex sound that we hear every day. Impairments of speech comprehension have a devastating effect on our social and intellectual lives and are insufficiently treated by sensory prostheses (e.g. hearing aids for age-related hearing loss), or rehabilitation (e.g. speech therapy for developmental language disorders, or aphasia). To understand and ameliorate these difficulties we take inspiration from the success of healthy listeners who can achieve successful comprehension despite many everyday challenges. We comprehend speech produced with a marked accent, or heard in a noisy environment, demonstrating robustness of sensory processing. Linguistic robustness is illustrated when we correctly interpret unfamiliar words in sentences or infer the correct meaning of ambiguous words like “bark” or “bank”. The brain systems that achieve resilient speech understanding in the face of these challenges may be responsible for comprehension impairments when they are damaged. If, conversely, these brain systems remain available to impaired listeners then they may permit new forms of rehabilitation. We work with a range of clinical populations with sensory and language impairments to test these hypotheses and to develop new methods of detecting speech comprehension impairments, discovering their underlying causes and suggesting new interventions.