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

语音是我们每天听到的最重要、最复杂的声音。言语理解障碍对我们的社会和智力生活有着毁灭性的影响，感觉假体（例如用于与年龄相关的听力损失的助听器）或康复（例如用于发育性语言障碍或失语症的言语治疗）治疗不足。为了理解和改善这些困难，我们从健康听众的成功中获得灵感，他们可以在许多日常挑战中获得成功的理解。我们理解带有明显口音的语音，或者在嘈杂的环境中听到的语音，这表明感官处理的鲁棒性。当我们正确地解释句子中不熟悉的单词或推断出像“bark”或“bank”这样的模糊单词的正确含义时，语言鲁棒性得到了说明。在面对这些挑战时实现弹性言语理解的大脑系统可能是在它们受损时造成理解障碍的原因。相反，如果这些大脑系统对受损的听众仍然可用，那么它们可能会允许新的康复形式。我们与一系列有感觉和语言障碍的临床人群合作，以测试这些假设，并开发检测言语理解障碍的新方法，发现其根本原因并提出新的干预措施。

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.