 |
 |
|
Kenny Vaden
I am a postdoc working with Dr. Mark Eckert in the Human Neurodiversity Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston. In 2009, I completed my Ph.D. studies in Psychology from the Department of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine, where I wrote a dissertation on speech perception and its cortical substrates advised by Dr. Greg Hickok. My research uses lexical and phonological counts to systematically modulate activity and characterize the functional neuroanatomy of speech perception. While at UCI, I developed the IPhOD database to study processes that are related to regular phonological sequences. At MUSC, I am studying how speech perception and underlying brain mechanisms change with age and hearing loss. Research
Upon close inspection, speech comprehension is an amazingly complicated act, although our everyday experience with language use seems effortless. This is the paradox that makes me interested in studying language and the brain. There is evidence from the cognitive sciences that speech involves many active mechanisms that work in concert to integrate new information in the incoming signal with previous experience with sounds patterns and words, monitor and repair errors, and ultimately recognize the abstract content of the message. My experiments relate to unconscious, tacit knowledge that may guide speech perception, production, and memory. Publications
Vaden, K.I. (2009). Phonological processes in speech perception. (Doctoral thesis, University of California, Irvine).
Updated: June 13, 2010 |