Weighing acoustic factors in music and language during development
Who: Christina M. Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden
What: Weighing acoustic factors in music and language during development
When: 10:30AM on Friday December 1, 2017
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room, top floor of the Knoll at Stanford
Why: How do we learn the meaning (or not) of sounds??
Bring your fully developed auditory brain to CCRMA and we'll expand it a bit.
-- Malcolm
Weighing acoustic factors in music and language during development
Christina M. Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden
Western University, London Ontario
Abstract
When you listen to the radio, it usually is not too hard to figure out whether you’re hearing Ed Sheeran sing or speak his new Top 40 hit. Speech and song are both important forms of human communication, and while adults easily tease these two categories apart, the boundaries between speech and song are blurred early in development due to the exaggerated nature of infant-directed speech. In this talk, I’ll cover whether children can differentiate between speech and song, how adults recruit domain-specific knowledge, and whether the acoustic characteristics of song can be used to improve neural processing of language.
Christina is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University in London, Ontario. She currently examines how adults and children track temporal information in speech and song and how this ability relates to language and reading outcomes. This work involves understanding how ongoing oscillatory activity in the brain phase-locks to the sounds we hear and whether acoustic characteristics change the strength of phase-locking to certain sounds over others. Christina received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) in 2016, where she studied music and language development and auditory scene processing with Drs. Erin Hannon and Joel Snyder. At UNLV, Christina investigated how it is we differentiate between speech and song by studying sounds that fall at the boundary -- ambiguous utterances that have both musical and speech-like qualities. Understanding how music is processed in the brain has been an interest of Christina's ever since she started to play the cello and sing in school.