Speech Production and Comprehension

This research group focuses on listeners' ability to understand speech in everyday challenging conditions, including speech perceived in noisy or distracting conditions and speech containing reduced pronunciation variants, hesitations, and disfluencies. The group investigates listeners' abilities to understand their native language and to learn to understand foreign languages, by means of an analysis of large language databases, psycholinguistic experimentation and computational modelling. The group also studies the ways in which speakers flexibly change their speech (e.g., speeding up or clarifying their speech) depending on the needs of the communicative situation and investigates how children and adults learn to convert the speech signal into orthographic representations.