Patti Adank
Rm 323 Chandler House. Email: p.adank@ucl.ac.uk
Research interests:
I am interested in supervising experiments that study how we process speech. I am
interested in how we process vocal actions. I am interested in supervising
behavioural projects on speech perception, production and imitation of speech.
Second, I am interested to supervise projects that employ Transcranial Magnetic
Stimulation (TMS) and/or motor evoked potentials (MEPs) to study speech
processing for students with a strong psychology/neuroscience background.
Suggested Projects
1. Automatic imitation of vocal actions
This project requires some understanding of speech perception, speech production
acoustics and some interest in cognitive neuroscience, the ability to work and think
independently and as part of a team of researchers, statistics skills, and some
knowledge of Praat and Matlab (help will be provided). Ethical approval is in place.
Background
Humans tend to spontaneously and automatically imitate fine phonetic aspects of
each other’s speech patterns in daily conversation. This ability to vocally imitate
others’ speech is essential for effective communication; it is required for learning to
speak, to be able to understand others in challenging listening conditions such as
background noise, and to streamline social interaction between conversation
partners.
Cognitive neuroscience research has demonstrated that humans automatically
activate motor plans required to execute an action during action observation. This
has also been reported for speech: when listening to speech, listeners automatically
activate the speech motor plans required to produce the speech themselves. There
is also evidence that the actual execution of these motor plans is actively
suppressed, thus preventing unwanted imitation of the heard speech.
Recent theories on language processing attribute a key role to the automatic
activation of motor plans during speech perception. One way to test the activation of
the motor plans is with the use of a paradigm widely used in cognitive psychology,
but that has been minimally explored in speech science: the Stimulus Response
Compatibility paradigm (SRC, see Heyes, 2011; Jarick & Jones, 2009; Kerzel &
Bekkering, 2000). The SRC effect can be defined as the degree to which an
observed action is compatible with the action an observer is required to perform in
response to the observed action. SRC can be used as a tool to explore imitation
phenomena at various neurophysiological and behavioural levels. Research on
automatic imitation as shown by SRC effects has received considerable attention in
recent years because it represents an experimental platform for investigating a
number of interrelated theories suggesting that the perception of an action
automatically activates corresponding motor programs. This project offers the
potential to expand it into a TMS or MEP project. In addition, I would be interested in
supervising a project on imitation of emotional vocal sounds in the context of the
SRC paradigm.
Tasks:
The project will require ~40 hours of data collection and ~40 hours of data analysis.
Tasks include: assisting in piloting the experiment, assisting in designing the stimuli,
recruitment of the participants, preparing the TMS experiment (consent forms,
experimental instructions), running the experiment, and analysis of the recordings
using Praat.
Suggested reading:
Heyes, C. (2011). Automatic Imitation. Psychological Bulletin, 137(3), 463-483.
Jarick, M., & Jones, J. A. (2009). Effects of seeing and hearing speech on speech
production: a response time study. Experimental Brain Research, 195, 175182.
Kerzel, D., & Bekkering, H. (2000). Motor activation from visible speech: Evidence
from stimulus response compatibility. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Human Perception and Performance, 26, 634-647.
2. Inhibition in speech production
This project requires some understanding of speech perception, speech production
acoustics and some interest in cognitive neuroscience, the ability to work
independently as well as in a team of researchers, some statistics skills, and some
knowledge of Praat and Matlab (help will be provided). Ethical approval is in place.
Background:
The ability to stop speaking is a form of response inhibition (i.e., the ability to
suppression behaviours that are irrelevant, dangerous or no longer appropriate).
There exists a vast body of literature on the ability to suppress hand actions, but
surprisingly little is known about the ability to halt speech production. This project
uses the stop-signal task to investigate how we are able to stop speaking. Speech is
the most complex motor behaviour we perform in daily life, involving a wide range of
articulators that all need to act in synchrony. Speech thus provides an extremely
versatile platform to study response inhibition and a wide range of responses can be
studied including meaningful and meaningless, or emotional and non-emotional
speech signals. In the first instance, this project will explore the stop-signal task (see
Logan & Cowan, 1984) for speech actions in a behavioural-only context, but this
project offers clear potential to expand it into a TMS or MEP project (Cai, George,
Verbruggen, Chambers, & Aron, 2012; Verbruggen, Best, Bowditch, Stevens, &
McLaren, 2014).
Tasks:
The project will require ~40 hours of data collection and ~40 hours of data analysis.
Tasks include: assisting in piloting the experiment, assisting in designing the stimuli,
recruitment of the participants, preparing the TMS experiment (consent forms,
experimental instructions), running the experiment, including the collection of
structural MRI scans, and analysis of the recordings using Praat.
Suggested reading:
Cai, W., George, J. S., Verbruggen, F., Chambers, C. D., & Aron, A. R. (2012). The
role of the right presupplementary motor area in stopping action: two studies
with event-related transcranial magnetic stimulation. Journal of
Neurophysiology, 108(2), 380-389.
Logan, G. D., & Cowan, W. B. (1984). On the ability to inhibit thought and action: A
theory of an act of control. Psychological Review, 91(3), 295-237.
Verbruggen, F., Best, M., Bowditch, W. A., Stevens, T., & McLaren, I. P. (2014). The
inhibitory control reflex. Neuropsychologia, 65, 263-278.