David Ostry
Yale University, CT·Neuroscience
Learning to speak, or adjusting speech when something changes, is usually seen as the job of the brain's movement areas. This project tests a new model of speech motor learning, the learning of the precise movements needed to speak.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
speech motor learning
speech production
memory retention
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Test whether auditory, somatosensory or motor cortex is causally needed to retain newly learned speech movements by suppressing each area with continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) after learning.
- Track the order in which neural changes appear during speech motor learning, testing whether early changes in auditory or somatosensory areas predict how much a person later learns.
- Identify sensory and motor areas whose baseline functional connectivity, the coordinated activity between regions, predicts later speech learning, and whose post-learning connectivity predicts retention.
- Combine brain stimulation, electrophysiological recording and neuroimaging to test a model in which plasticity in sensory systems supports both learning and retention of speech movements.
More about the research
The model proposes that learning and remembering new speech movements also depend on plasticity, meaning lasting change, in sensory brain regions. These are auditory cortex, which processes sound, and somatosensory cortex, which processes touch and body position. The idea grows out of the team's preliminary work. That work supports plasticity in all three systems involved in speech motor learning: auditory, somatosensory and motor.
Why it matters
The work aims to clarify how the brain learns and stores new speech movements, and whether sensory areas for hearing and touch take part alongside motor areas. This basic understanding of speech learning and retention could eventually inform how researchers think about acquiring or relearning speech skills. The grants do not name a specific clinical application.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
John Houde
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience
Relate the location of cerebellar degeneration to specific speech symptoms such as articulation, pitch and timing problems in patients with cerebellar ataxia, using speech psychophysics experiments.
Ayoub Daliri
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Neuroscience
Evaluate how exposure to auditory errors alters predictive sensorimotor processes in children and adults who stutter, using behavioral and neurophysiological recordings to test whether stuttering involves inaccurate speech predictions across the lifespan.
Joy Schmitz
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether adding active rather than sham deep TMS with an H4 coil to contingency management raises abstinence, increases cocaine-negative urines and reduces craving in people who do not respond to contingency management alone.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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