Brain rhythms during audiovisual natural language processing (including research plans for developmental approach)

Join Dr. Hyojin Park, Assistant Professor and Birmingham Fellow at the School of Psychology and Centre for Human Brain Health (CHBH), for her hybrid seminar entitled 'Brain rhythms during audiovisual natural language processing (including research plans for developmental approach)' from 12 - 1pm, Friday 3 May 2024.

"Recent evidence suggests that brain rhythms track the acoustic envelope in auditory speech (speech entrainment), and this mechanism facilitates speech intelligibility. We recently demonstrated that this is the case for visual speech (lip movement) as well. This has led us to ask to what extent auditory and visual information are represented in brain areas, either jointly or individually. Which system conveys shared information from multisensory inputs, and which system represents the inputs synergistically?

"In my talk, firstly, I will present our recent work, which shows how information in entrained and how auditory and visual speech interact to facilitate speech comprehension. Here, we used a novel Information Theory approach (Partial Information Decomposition: PID) to decompose dynamic information quantities, e.g. synergy, redundancy, and unique information. Secondly, I will also show how the information interaction between audiovisual speech rhythms is represented as a function of time in different brain regions.

"Lastly, I will discuss a model-based framework to analyse MEG (Magnetoencephalography) responses to reconstruct speech rhythms concerning our ability to extract high-level semantics (topic keywords) in a story. I will also outline our ongoing research program, which focuses on the developmental aspects of multisensory speech processing, aiming to shed light on how these capabilities evolve over time."

 This is a hybrid seminar, that will be streaming via Zoom: attendees can view online, or attend in-person collectively at 52 Prichatts Road, Room 412 (G9 on the campus map).

Discover more about Dr. Hyojin Park's work here.

This talk is part of the ongoing Language and Cognition at Birmingham (LACAB) Psycholinguistics Seminar Series. Discover more information about LACAB and its upcoming events here.