Postdoctoral Fellow
Natural communication is accompanied by an abundance of contextual information relevant to understanding, including both sensory information external to the listener (e.g., observed mouth movements and co-speech gestures) and knowledge or expectations internal to the listener (e.g., discourse context). Most behavioral and neurobiological research of language, however, discards context in favor of studying isolated speech sounds or words. In contrast, the long-term objective of my research is to understand the neural mechanisms of communication in real-world social settings in which the brain evolved, develops, and normally functions. This research is guided by a theoretical model of communication in which the brain actively makes use of context to aid in speech perception and language comprehension by using this information to generate predictions about forthcoming sensory patterns to constrain linguistic interpretation. Using behavioral, electrophysiological (EEG and MEG) and neuroimaging (fMRI) methods to test and continue to elaborate this model, my research has resulted in theoretical advances with respect to understanding how the brain makes use of naturally occurring context and methodological advances that permit the analysis multimodal data resulting from real-world stimuli.
This research is supported by NIH-NICHD K99/R00 HD060307 - "Neurobiology of Speech Perception in Real-World Contexts"
For more information see:
http://sites.google.com/site/jeremyskipper/