This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising scholar studying the psychological and neural underpinnings of speech perception. The focus of this grant is on the flexibility that is necessary to both learn new sounds and to understand people speaking a familiar language with an accent or dialect. Some people are better than others at mastering the new sounds of a language, just as some people are better than others at understanding accented speech. But do these two different skills go hand-in-hand? By answering this question, this project will unlock important insights into human language abilities, thereby allowing for the creation of better voice recognition technology, better foreign language training, and a clearer sense of how the brain adapts to new language situations. The project will also improve science communication through the dissemination of a novel peer-to-peer science communication module and enhanced collaboration with a local science museum.

This project centers on a critical area of research within neuroscience: plasticity. In speech perception, plasticity--the ability to change behavior based on input from the environment--is required throughout the lifetime. There are substantial individual differences in phonetic learning of new speech sound categories, as happens when learning a new language, and also in phonetic adaptation of known speech sound categories, as occurs when encountering an accented talker. Despite the parallels between phonetic learning and phonetic adaptation, these two domains remain only weakly connected. In this project, a series of studies are designed to test whether a single, unified mechanism underlies plasticity for speech sound learning of non-native categories and plasticity for speech sound adaptation to unusual variants embedded in native language speech. The project reflects a search for common behavioral and neural correlates of plasticity for learning and plasticity for adaptation. This search will be undertaken using a combination of (1) finding intercorrelations between two tasks of phonetic learning and two tasks of phonetic adaptation that vary in task demands, (2) probing for correlates of those tasks in structural MRI, resting-state MRI, and DTI measures, and (3) assessment of causal mechanisms of phonetic plasticity by way of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). These experiments will be used to test a proposed model of phonetic plasticity with specific behavioral and neural predictions.

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (SMA)
Application #
1714858
Program Officer
Josie S. Welkom
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2017-08-01
Budget End
2019-07-31
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2017
Total Cost
$138,000
Indirect Cost
Name
Heffner Christopher C
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
College Park
State
MD
Country
United States
Zip Code
20740