Home > Events > LSLT: Annie Li (HDQM) & Neha Joshi (ECE)

LSLT: Annie Li (HDQM) & Neha Joshi (ECE)

Time: 
Thursday, April 18, 2019 - 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM
Location: 
Language Science Center (2130 H.J. Patterson)

 

Annie Li (HDQM) 

Self-Teaching in Orthographic Learning among Learners of English as a Second Language

Abstract: Previous research showed that children can acquire new written words in their native languages implicitly with a few exposures during independent text reading. In this talk, I will present an investigation on whether and how second language learners learn new words via self-teaching. Specifically, we examined the effects of exposure time, story context and phonological structure on written word learning among Chinese children who are learning English as a second language. Results suggest that there is a facilitative role of story context and challenge posed by initial consonant clusters. 

Neha Joshi (ECE)

Cortical mechanisms underlying speech segregation in the ferret cocktail party

Abstract: In a noisy environment with multiple speakers, the auditory system needs to deconstruct the speech to be able to segregate the sound mixture and process the streams of interest selectively. This effect of attending to a single source from a mixture is called the cocktail party effect. We use the ferret as an animal model to study how the auditory cortex resolves this problem. In the first part of this work, we design a simulated cocktail party problem and train ferrets to attend to a single speaker in a two-speaker mixture. For the second part of this work, we record neurophysiological data from the primary and secondary auditory cortex to understand the mechanisms underlying selective processing in the auditory cortex in the brain. 

Lunch (nachos!) will be served at 12:15.