Foto: Henk Veenstra

Our new VICI project on voice and speech perception in normal and impaired hearing is featured at the UMCG newsletter Kennisinzicht. It covers all the highlights of what we want to do — how we want to understand both the basic science behind voice perception in relation to speech understanding and how we want to make use of this knowledge to help hearing-impaired individuals. The fun sub projects involve using Sam the robot for more efficient and fun testing and training.

For more details, the link to the KennisInzicht article is here.

Jeanne Clarke’s submission, “Top-Down Repair of Interrupted Speech in Electro-Acoustic Stimulation,” co-authored with Etienne Gaudrain, is upgraded to a talk at CIAP 2017.
Congratulations Jeanne!

Leanne Nagels’s submission “Lexical access in cochlear implant users” to AMLaP 2017 is upgraded to a podium talk. The work was supervised by Dr. Anita Wagner and conducted in collaboration with Prof. Roelien Bastiaanse (Neurolinguistics). Congratulations!

Christina Fuller has won the 2016 Best PhD Thesis Prize from KNO Vereniging (Dutch ENT Society). Congratulations!

A potential transfer-of-training advantage musicians may have in speech perception remains an elusive topic. Our recent research on musician effect on speech perception (Başkent, D., and Gaudrain, E., 2016, Musician advantage for speech-on-speech perception, JASA-EL 139, EL51-EL56) has shown a strong musician effect for speech on speech perception (single target talker and single masker talker). We had also manipulated the difference in the voices of the masker and target speech, as we suspected the root of musician effect to be better perception of voice cues.  This idea, however, did not seem to hold, leading to many more questions on where this advantage may be coming from.

This research is now featured at a fun Scientific American podcast:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/bring-a-musician-to-untangle-cocktail-party-din/