Speaking my language: International speech acquisition in Australia. It is important to differentiate between children who have communication impairment (difficulty learning all languages) from those who only have difficulty learning subsequent language(s). Communication impairment in multilingual children is both undiagnosed and over-diagnosed due to lack of culturally-sensitive measurement tools. Early intervention can ameliorate communication impairment in children and can reduce subsequent e ....Speaking my language: International speech acquisition in Australia. It is important to differentiate between children who have communication impairment (difficulty learning all languages) from those who only have difficulty learning subsequent language(s). Communication impairment in multilingual children is both undiagnosed and over-diagnosed due to lack of culturally-sensitive measurement tools. Early intervention can ameliorate communication impairment in children and can reduce subsequent educational, social and occupational outcomes of untreated communication impairment. By working with people around the world, this Fellowship will result in the development of the International Speech Assessment designed to differentially identify children and to specify holistic early intervention goals.Read moreRead less
Illuminating the Language-specific and Physiological Motor-control Influences on Children's Production of Lexical Stress. Great progress has been made in understanding the production of individual speech sounds but much less is known about the production of prosody. Lexical stress is a type of prosody that reflects the contrast between strong and weak syllables within single words. The ability to achieve this contrastivity shows a protracted developmental trajectory in healthy children and is at ....Illuminating the Language-specific and Physiological Motor-control Influences on Children's Production of Lexical Stress. Great progress has been made in understanding the production of individual speech sounds but much less is known about the production of prosody. Lexical stress is a type of prosody that reflects the contrast between strong and weak syllables within single words. The ability to achieve this contrastivity shows a protracted developmental trajectory in healthy children and is atypical in some children with autism. How these developmental influences relate to language-specific versus physiological motor-control factors is unknown. This project will address this critical research problem via innovative acoustic investigations. Outcomes will trigger the next generation of speech production models with potential for impact in areas like speech pathology.Read moreRead less
The new voice of Multicultural Australian English. This project aims to generate an integrated and inclusive model of Australian-English, through phonetic analysis of the spoken language used by adolescents from a range of ethnic backgrounds. Australia is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world yet the complex relationship between speech production and cultural diversity is largely unknown in 21st century multicultural Australia. This project aims to establish how adolescents f ....The new voice of Multicultural Australian English. This project aims to generate an integrated and inclusive model of Australian-English, through phonetic analysis of the spoken language used by adolescents from a range of ethnic backgrounds. Australia is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world yet the complex relationship between speech production and cultural diversity is largely unknown in 21st century multicultural Australia. This project aims to establish how adolescents from different ethnicities use speech patterns to symbolically express their diverse sociocultural identities. The project expects to inform sociophonetic theories of variation, ethnicity, and identity, providing a framework for supporting sociocultural cohesion in Australia. Read moreRead less
Enhancing language learning via auditory training and parent-infant interaction. This project aims to improve adult language learning. Most adults struggle to pronounce foreign speech, because their native processing skills cannot process foreign sounds. During infancy, native sound perception is tuned through listening to variants of speech sounds while interacting with care-givers. This project aims to show that adults can reprogram their processing skills if placed in the rich environment ava ....Enhancing language learning via auditory training and parent-infant interaction. This project aims to improve adult language learning. Most adults struggle to pronounce foreign speech, because their native processing skills cannot process foreign sounds. During infancy, native sound perception is tuned through listening to variants of speech sounds while interacting with care-givers. This project aims to show that adults can reprogram their processing skills if placed in the rich environment available to infants. Rigorous testing will show whether auditory training improves processing of foreign speech sounds in adults and children and leads to successful understanding and pronunciation of foreign words. This project could benefit many Australian monolingual families who have not fully engaged with neighbouring cultures due to a language barrier.Read moreRead less
Developing better treatments for language disorders. This project will enable better treatment of people with disorders affecting language such as aphasia, dyslexia, and dementia. It will achieve this through development of more detailed theories of language processing, better assessment of language disorders and a better understanding of how treatments for language disorders have their effects.
A new model of human speech production through computational modeling and human functional brain imaging. It is still largely a mystery how we convert our thoughts into fluent intelligible speech. This project will bring together experts in speech pathology, neuroscience, and computer modeling to create a new biologically-plausible model of speech production to advance understanding of speech development, ageing, and mechanisms of recovery after injury.
Testing the Modularity of Memory. Researchers disagree about whether verbal and visual working memory (WM) storage occurs in separate modules. Recent evidence suggests that only verbal memoranda have access to a specialised module, while visual memories make use of more general resources. This project aims to re-examine interference between verbal and visual memoranda using statistical methods specialised for assessing whether multiple latent factors underlie performance on recognition memory ta ....Testing the Modularity of Memory. Researchers disagree about whether verbal and visual working memory (WM) storage occurs in separate modules. Recent evidence suggests that only verbal memoranda have access to a specialised module, while visual memories make use of more general resources. This project aims to re-examine interference between verbal and visual memoranda using statistical methods specialised for assessing whether multiple latent factors underlie performance on recognition memory tasks, examining adult and child populations. This is expected to influence applications of WM theory in many everyday settings, resulting in improvements in educational practices, workplace procedures, and clinical treatments that depend on theoretical understandings of limits in cognition.Read moreRead less
Parallel and generative binding in human visual cortex. Imagine watching a group of children running around in brightly coloured T-shirts. How does your brain keep track of which colour goes with which T-shirt goes with which child? This project will use magnetic resonance imaging to identify where in our brains information about colour, shape and motion gets put together.
Lipidomics of vision. Presbyopia and cataract are the major causes of visual impairment worldwide. Nevertheless, our understanding of lens ageing at both a cellular and molecular level is limited. This project will gain new insight into the effect of age on lens membrane lipids and their role in the development of presbyopia and cataract.
Seeing the forest and the trees: Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying recognition of individual objects and sets. When confronted with a set of similar objects, such as a crowd of faces or a flow of oncoming cars, human observers can rapidly and seemingly automatically extract summary statistics of these sets of objects (e.g., mean expression or location). This research will provide insights into how the human visual system executes this massive feat of computation. This represents a vital ....Seeing the forest and the trees: Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying recognition of individual objects and sets. When confronted with a set of similar objects, such as a crowd of faces or a flow of oncoming cars, human observers can rapidly and seemingly automatically extract summary statistics of these sets of objects (e.g., mean expression or location). This research will provide insights into how the human visual system executes this massive feat of computation. This represents a vital step in understanding vision in general and in eventually applying our knowledge to the development of artificial vision systems and to rehabilitation of visual disorders. The research will also investigate the effects of attentional load on perception of summary statistics of the environment, which is critical for tasks such as driving in busy traffic.Read moreRead less