Research Overview

All of our research is designed to help us better understand how people hear complex sounds such as speech, how experience shapes the way he hear our world, and how we use what we hear to guide our actions and to communicate. These questions inspire us to be interdisciplinary in our thinking and experimental methods. Our work is at an intersection between traditional problems in perception, cognitive psychology, communication disorders, computer science, electrical engineering, linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy. We always begin with quite general principles of perception, and our work is frequently informed by approaches to analogous issues for vision, particularly information theory and Bayesian models.

Our research questions encourage the use of many experimental tools. We study the performance of human listeners in a broad array of psychophysical and learning tasks. We use neurophysiological data to reveal auditory processes and to inform models of learning and plasticity. We use computational simulations of hearing and learning to generate and test new hypotheses. Although our emphasis is upon basic questions, our work is being extended to clinical problems of hearing impairment and language delay, and to practical solutions such as cochlear prosthetics (implants), hearing aid design, and computer speech recognition.

Recent conceptual/review chapters:

Kluender, K.R., Stilp, C.E., & Kiefte, M. (in press). “Perception of vowel sounds within a biologically realistic model of efficient coding”. Chapter to appear in Vowel-Inherent Spectral Change (Springer).

Kluender, K.R. & Alexander, J.M. (2008). "Perception of speech sounds." In A.I. Basbaum, A. Kaneko, G.M. Shepard, & G. Westheimer, (Eds.), The Senses: A Comprehensive Reference, Vol. 3, Audition, P. Dallos & D. Oertel (Eds.), pp. 829-860,. San Diego: Academic Press

Kluender, K.R. & Kiefte, M. (2006). "Speech perception within a biologically-realistic information-theoretic framework."  In M.A. Gernsbacher and M. Traxler (Eds.) Handbook of Psycholinguistics, pp 153-199. London, Elsevier.

Click on the links below to learn more about our different lines of research.

 

Sensorineural Processes

Perceptual Experience

Speech for Language

Applications

Hearing Research at Wisconsin