The SLaP Lab has received a seed grant from the Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences. The title of the project is “Speech sound processing in bilingual, infant, and impaired populations.” The speech signal provides listeners with information about both who is speaking and what is being said. Research on typical adults suggests that efficient comprehension requires integrating these two sources of information. Our project uses behavioral and neuroimaging methods to examine how babies learn to integrate these two sources of information, how bilinguals integrate this information across their two languages,and whether children with language impairment show deficits in integrating talker and linguistic information. This grant will fund pilot data collection for multiple extramural grant applications . This work is in collaboration with Dr. Adrian Garcia-Sierra (University of Connecticut), Dr. Xin Xie (University of Connecticut), and Nick Monto, a Ph.D. student in the SLaP Lab.

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