Adeen Flinker
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Recognizing a word in fluent speech requires the brain to combine sound information over time windows ranging from tens to hundreds of milliseconds. These windows are much longer than the brief responses of the auditory nerve, so the auditory cortex, the brain's hearing region, must do this integration itself.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
speech perception
auditory cortex
temporal integration
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Map the integration periods, the time windows over which neurons combine sound, across primary and non-primary auditory cortex, using direct cortical recordings in neurosurgical patients.
- Relate temporal processing in each auditory region to the emergence of phonemic, phonotactic, and semantic representations during fluent speech.
- Identify the nonlinear computational mechanisms that let auditory cortex integrate fast acoustic features over long durations, using new speech paradigms and computational modeling.
More about the research
It is still debated which intermediate units, such as speech sounds, sound patterns, or meanings, the brain builds on the way from sound to meaning. Noninvasive brain imaging lacks the precision in space and time needed to settle this question.
Why it matters
Knowing how the auditory cortex combines speech sounds over time is essential for understanding how speech perception breaks down in speech and communication disorders. The findings could inform new therapeutic strategies for these impairments. They could also shed light on a mapping from sound to words that machine systems still find hard to replicate.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael Brown
Villanova University, PA·Psychology·Early-career
Identify which sound information listeners use to tell spoken words apart by recording brain responses in the first few hundred milliseconds after hearing speech.
Edmund Lalor
University of Rochester, NY·Neuroscience
Measure "perceptual echoes", reverberating responses in early visual cortex, with high-density EEG to isolate top-down predictive feedback in healthy volunteers and in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Maya Henry
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Neuroscience
Evaluate whether Multi-PA telerehabilitation, which combines restorative language therapy, compensatory strategies and care-partner training, is feasible and acceptable in a randomized pilot of 30 people with PPA and 30 care partners.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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