Enhancing audiovisual perception for speech rehabilitation

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Investigating individual differences in audiovisual speech perception would be the ideal next step for my academiccareer, combining key interests in vision, language processing and multivariate methods in MEG with the potential forclinical translation. Throughout my studies in English, Psychology and Neuroscience, as well as research in visualperception, psychophysics and psycholinguistics, I have gained a sustained interest in the neurological underpinnings ofour ability to speak and listen, and intend to study these in a PhD. The capacity to use and process language in itsvarious multimodal formats is essential for participation in everyday life, and impairment in this capacity e.g. due tohearing loss may significantly lower quality of life. A PhD project leveraging findings from basic cognitive neuroscienceresearch on the language system towards translational benefits is therefore of particular interest to me. My researchexperiences have given me an appreciation for studying the neurobiological underpinnings of how sensory signals aretranslated into complex, meaningful representations in the brain. Throughout my undergraduate and my prospectiveMPhil project, I have become particularly interested in multivariate analysis for temporal measures of neural activity,disentangling distinct stages of processing. In sum, investigating the contribution of vision during language processing inits most ecological form towards clinical benefits is a perfect match for me.