Speech Research Laboratory 

“Why is multitasking, texting a problem? It has an impact on students’ ability to understand and absorb, code, store and process information — and learn,” said David Pisoni, Chancellor’s Professor of psychology at Indiana University. “Memory and attention are limited. Students don’t realize that when they study and engage in other activities, that multitasking comes at a price.”

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BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — David B. Pisoni, Chancellor’s Professor of psychology and cognitive science at Indiana University Bloomington and adjunct professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at the IU School of Medicine, has been named the recipient of the Silver Medal in Speech Communication, awarded by the Acoustical Society of America.

The honor is given “for advancing the basic science of speech perception and recognition and applying the knowledge to the clinical field of cochlear implantation,” according to the award citation. Pisoni will be presented with the award in November at the 160th meeting of the ASA, held in Cancun, Mexico.

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BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — In 1979 Chancellor’s Professor David Pisoni brought the first two postdoctoral researchers to Indiana University Bloomington when he was awarded a five-year training grant by the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders. Today, the same grant supports six postdoctoral researchers, six doctoral students and six medical students in Bloomington and Indianapolis.

The training program, now funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), has received additional funding to continue through 2014 — making it the longest existing training grant in NIDCD history. NIDCD will provide more than $3 million for training in biomedical research involving language delay, cognitive aging and hearing loss, and the use of sensory aids, such as cochlear implants and hearing aids.

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Robert Felty and Volya Kapatsinski recently gave presentation at the 6th conference on the Mental Lexicon in Banff, Alberta, Canada, October 7th-10th. Over 100 leading scholars in psycholinguistics and word recognition came together to discuss their research on trying to discover how humans store and access words.

Robert gave an oral presentation with co-authors Adam Buchwald and David B. Pisoni entitled Constructing neighborhood density from spoken word recognition errors. Click on the image to download slides from the presentation in pdf format.

Volya presented a poster entitled Product and source-oriented generalization over an (artificial) lexicon. Click on the image to download a pdf version of the poster.

Two honor students working in the SRL, Althea Bauernschmidt and Melissa Troyer, recently defended their honors theses.

Audiovisual Phonological Fusion and Temporal Asynchrony
Melissa Troyer

In her thesis, Melissa investigated the perception and detection of timing asynchronies in a newly discovered phenomenon known as audiovisual phonological fusion (AVPF). In this type of fusion, visual information (e.g., back) combines with auditory information (e.g., lack) to create a fused percept (i.e., black).

Subjects were presented with stimuli that different in the amount of temporal offset ranging from 300 ms of auditory lead to 500 ms of visual lead and completed two tasks. In the asynchrony judgment task, subjects were asked to determine whether the auditory and visual portions of a stimulus occurred at the same time (“in sync”) or at different times (“out of sync”). The stimuli presented in both tasks were the same, but the ordering of the tasks was manipulated in order to see whether performing one task first would have an effect on the other task.

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