Jonathan Peelle

Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit

Medical Research Council

Wednesday, November 12

3:00-4:30 pm

The interaction of perception and cognition in speech comprehension

Understanding spoken language requires the coordination of multiple

cognitive systems in order to process rapid acoustic input and perform

linguistic operations. Despite recent insights from functional

neuroimaging, the neural bases for these processes are still unclear.

This talk will consider speech comprehension within a general

framework of resource allocation, in which the brain regions

supporting comprehension are dynamically allocated to support the

current task. Given this model of speech processing, an important

challenge is to identify how different types of challenges modulate

the network of regions supporting comprehension. This question will

be investigated by studying sentence comprehension under conditions of

(a) reduced neural efficiency and (b) reduced perceptual clarity.

using behavioral, structural MRI, and fMRI data from healthy older

adults and patients with neurodegenerative disease.