Dr M. Bentum (Martijn)

Speech perception is an interesting and challenging topic of investigation. After many decades of research of the human speech comprehension system, it is still not completely understood how humans can swiftly and reliably identify words in a continuous speech stream. One of the challenges is to better understand how listeners deal with the great variability in the acoustic signal of speech. Speakers tend to pronounce words in many different variants and this creates a ambiguity in the speech signal. Listeners can deal with this ambiguity with ease. However, it is still not properly understood how they accomplish this.

My PhD-project will focus on the interaction of memory-based prediction and speech register in auditory word recognition. I hypothesize that listeners use the preceding speech context to create predictions of upcoming speech and that this will aid in word recognition. I will investigate this by first establishing phoneme and word probabilities in casual and formal speec