Areas of Research

Acquisition

Research on language acquisition within the Centre includes work on:

• Normal first language acquisition, especially the acquisition of Phonology, Syntax and the Lexicon; Phonetic perception during the first year of life; The development of speech perception in older children and of speaker normalization; sign language acquisition in children in deaf families.
• Normal second language acquisition, and the acquisition of literacy; Bilingual development.
• First language development in a variety of pathological conditions, especially Williams syndrome, Down syndrome, and SLI (Specific Language Impairment) including signers with developmental language impairements.
• Second language acquisition in abnormal conditions (the savant syndrome).
• Speech and language disorders affecting acquisition.
• Connectionist modeling of language acquisition.

This work is carried out in Human Communication Sciences, the Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience, the Institute for Child Health, Phonetics and Linguistics, and the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, and also in collaboration with scholars elsewhere in London (especially Birkbeck College, the Institute of Education, and City University), in Europe, and the USA.

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Neurobiology of Communication

Research on the Neurobiology of Communication within the Centre includes:

• Neuropsychological approaches: including research on acquired speech and language problems, both in production and perception, with adult aphasic groups.
• Neuro-Genetic approaches including work on inherited speech and language problems, and the influence of genetic disorders on neuroanatomy and function. Work includes linguistic and non linguistic deficits in the KE family, and affective processing in Turner's syndrome.
• Neuroscience approaches: including work on the functional neuroanatomy of speech annd sign language perception and production, in normal adults and patients populations . Work studies the neural control of speech production, the neuroanatomy anatomy of speech perception, the basis of hemispheric asymmetries in speech and sign processing, the neural basis of attention in speech perception and cross modal enhancements, and the interaction of auditory and prefrontal cortex. Patient studies include investigations of the functional anatomical changes associated with recovery from stroke in speech perception and production.

Work goes on in the Functional Imaging Laboratory, Human Communication Sciences, Institute for Child Health, Phonetics and Linguistics, Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, and Psychology.

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Pathology

Research on Speech and Sign Language Pathology within the Centre includes:

• Research on the basic nature of the selected disorder (e.g. whether it has a genetic component, arises out of CNS damage or is a functional disorder) and whether there are unique identifying characteristics and its aetiology.
• Employment of this understanding of the disorder in differential diagnosis and remedial treatment.
• Disorders covered range FROM those that start in childhood (e.g. stuttering) through to those characteristic of adulthood (e.g. aphasia, Parkinson’s disease).

Research is concentrated in the departments of Phonetics and Linguistics, the Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology, Human Communication Sciences, Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, and the Institute of Child Health.

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Perception

Research on speech and sign perception within the Centre includes work on:

• Peripheral and central auditory processing in speech perception, including research on the effects of hearing impairment; cochlear implants; neurobiology and phonetic perception.
• Plasticity in auditory, sign and speech perception; including research on normal and pathological development; second language learning; processing of sign language through proprioceptive and tactile inputs; relearning after restoration of hearing.
• Integration of auditory and visual speech information; including research on second language learning, auditory-visual perception in hearing impaired listeners; synthesis of visual speech; speechreading in the absence of hearing.
• Links between impairments of auditory, speech, and linguistic processing.

Work goes on in the departments of Phonetics and Linguistics, Human Communication Sciences, Institute for Child Health, Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, and Psychology

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Pragmatics

Research on Pragmatics within the Centre includes:

• The semantics-pragmatics interface: including research on pragmatic contributions to explicit content; lexical semantics and pragmatics; discourse connectives and particles; procedural meaning; the explicit-implicit distinction.
• Speech acts and rhetoric: including research on metaphor, idiom and irony; persuasion and deception; literary interpretation; stylistic and poetic effects; the distinction between mood and force.
• Pragmatics and mental architecture: including research on pragmatics and modularity; the nature and role of concepts; implications of work on development and breakdown of communication; paralinguistic aspects of communication; non-verbal communication.
• Relevance and inference: including research on the nature of relevance; the role of relevance in communication and cognition; the borderline between decoding and inference; relevance and rationality.

Work goes on Phonetics and Linguistics, the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the department of Human Communication Sciences.

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Production

Research on Speech and Sign Production within the Centre includes:

• Laryngeal control: using acoustic and laryngographic techniques, the study of vocal fold vibration (phonation) in normal and pathological voice; modes of vibration associated with different voice qualities; the interaction of phonation quality with changes in frequency. Stroboscopic imaging of vocal fold vibration.
• Disordered production: motor speech difficulties, stuttering, sign dysarthria
• Neural control of speech production: in normal and patient populations. What CNS structures subserve motor actions.
• English phonetics: intonation, stress and accentuation, connected speech phenomena, contemporary standard English, L2 and interlanguage characteristics
• Sign language production: alterations in sign space in the context of acquired neurological or visual impairments.

Work on these is based in Human Communication Sciences, Phonetics and Linguistics, Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, and in Psychology, and the Functional Imaging Laboratory. Future plans for the centre include establishing collaborations with institutions within UCL such as the Institute of Movement Neuroscience, where there is shared interest in understanding complex co-ordinative movement control.

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Rehabilitation

Research on Rehabilitation and Therapy within the Centre includes :

• Therapy for developmental speech and language difficulties: including research on children with SLI, autism, motor speech difficulties
• Therapy for acquired speech, language and swallowing difficulties: including research on aphasia, dementia, motor speech difficulties
• Therapy methods and processes: including research on therapy using a psycholinguistic framework, functional and conversation-focused intervention, augmentative and alternative communication, collaboration between therapists and other professionals

Work goes on in Human Communication Sciences, and the Institute for Child Health.

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Technology Innovations

Research on Technological applications of Speech Science within the Centre includes:

• Speech synthesis: computer voice output with more expressive prosody; speech synthesis from concept; evaluation of speech synthesis systems.
• Speech recognition: acoustic modeling of the realization of phonological units; design of acoustic analysis for recognition; modelling of pronunciation variation.
• Statistical language modeling: prediction of word sequences with application to human-machine and human-human dialogues.
• Speech pattern audiometry: use of speech-like patterns for the assessment of hearing for speech.
• Voice analysis: Laryngographic analysis of voice quality and use of pitch; stroboscopic imaging of vocal fold vibration.

Research goes on in the departments of Phonetics and Linguistics, and Human Communication Sciences. See also speech synthesis and Speech Recognition.

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Theory Construction and Modelling

Research involving Theory Construction and Models within the Centre includes:

• Phonology: theories of the phonological component of the human language faculty (such as element theory, dependency phonology, and Optimality Theory); interfaces between this component and phonetics, morphology and syntax; the acquisition of phonology; phonology and language disorders.
• Syntax: theories of the syntactic component of the human language faculty (such as Mirror Theory, Bare Phrase Structure Theory ,Word Grammar, and Optimality Theory); interfaces between this component and phonology, morphology and interpretive systems; the acquisition of syntax; syntax and language disorders.
• Pragmatics: <link>

Research takes place within the departments of Phonetics and Linguistics, and Italian.

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