Attention Speech & Hearing Lab

Noisy environments can pose a challenge for speech perception. One reason for this is that listeners may struggle to pay attention to the acoustic cues important for distinguishing different speech sounds. In this study, we found that listeners make greater use of multiple cues when attentional resources are limited by the presence of a competing talker.

Musical training is associated with a number of perceptual and cognitive benefits, but can it influence the way we perceive speech? In this study, we show that musicians and non-musicians differ in the way they integrate, or combine acoustic information when categorizing speech.

Here we show that distracting sounds change our perception of time. In six studies, listeners tapped to the beat of a metronome while ignoring distracting background sounds. After the distracting sounds, tapping temporarily sped up relative to the beat. This suggests that distracting sounds expanded time perception, leading listeners to believe that more time passed than actually had.

There are a multitude of sounds in our environment. How do we tell one sound from another? Some theories suggest that we categorize sounds by directing attention to certain acoustic dimensions (like pitch or timing). Here we present a neural measure of attention to acoustic dimensions that can be used to test these theories of sound categorization.