Guest speaker: Christian Brodbeck (University of Maryland, College Park)

We are delighted to welcome Christian Brodbeck, who is a postdoc at the University of Maryland, College Park, having completed his Ph.D. at New York University in 2016. His research is on neurolinguistics and cognition, especially with respect to processing on the semantic/pragmatic level. He will be giving a talk, "Time-locked cortical processing of continuous speech: From sound to words, and effects of selective attention," on Wednesday, March 11, from 2 PM to 4 PM, in SS 560A.

In most realistic contexts, speech is experienced as a continuous acoustic signal. MEG and EEG have the temporal resolution to track neural processes with millisecond accuracy, but the inherent temporal dynamics of natural, continuous speech pose a challenge for traditional data analysis techniques. In this talk I will introduce an approach modeling MEG responses to speech as a continuous, linear response to multiple concurrent, continuous predictor variables. This approach makes it possible to disentangle overlapping brain responses to successive events in naturalistic speech stimuli, such as an audiobook. By generating predictor variables based on cognitive models of neural processes, we can distinguish different cognitive processes involved in speech processing.