Congratulate to Dr Lindsey Van Yper, an early career researcher, on her successful application to the Linguistic Department’s Chitra Fernando ECR fund. Lindsey’s research will address the question of “How does the human brain separate foreground and background in complex auditory scenes?”
The aim of this project is to gain insight into how the human brain separates sounds into foreground and background – a key factor to hear out a conversation (foreground) in background noise (background).
This is important, because understanding speech in noise is essential to human interactions and it is the primary complaint of those with hearing loss. In addition, there is ample evidence to suggest that auditory processing is degraded in neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders and dyslexia. Here, we use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate how the brain processes specific acoustic features that are important for foreground-background formation.