Chung Yin Joseph Lau
Northwestern University, IL·Neuroscience
Many autistic people find it hard to pick up emotional and social cues in speech and to follow speech in noisy places. One explanation is that the brain normally uses context to understand speech.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
autism spectrum disorder
speech perception
speech in noise
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test whether the balance between top-down expectation signals and local speech representations is disrupted in autism, using EEG to measure context-dependent processing of speech sounds.
- Determine whether this disruption appears across levels of the brain's hearing pathway, from basic sound encoding to processing of continuous natural speech, using multi-level EEG approaches.
- Test whether EEG signatures of context-dependent hearing relate to and contribute to speech, language and social communication traits in autistic individuals.
More about the research
For example, it learns which sounds or words are likely to come next, uses that to sharpen important signals and tunes out noise. Autistic listeners may use this context less. Why this happens in the brain is still unclear, and the answer matters for social life, friendships and work communication.
Why it matters
By identifying the brain basis of speech-listening difficulties in autism, this work could guide interventions that target the underlying mechanism. The proposed EEG markers could become an objective tool to predict and measure improvement in speech and language therapies for autistic people.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Judy Thompson
University of Rochester, NY·Neuroscience
Test whether auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia are linked to impaired neural encoding of speech, by modeling EEG brain responses to clear and acoustically degraded speech in patients with and without hallucinations and in healthy controls.
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.
Fernando Llanos Lucas
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Neuroscience
Compare how speakers of languages with simpler versus more complex sound systems perceive key speech features, using auditory perception tasks.
The school
Northwestern University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 536 research doctorates a year.
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